We’re stuck with music biopics. Though Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story 17 years ago made the hallmarks of this subgenre obvious, in a post-Bohemian Rhapsody world, we’re trapped with these movies. Surely by the end of the 2020s, we’ll have Pete Davidson earning his first Oscar nomination for playing Glen Phillips in a Toad the Wet Sprocket movie entitled Good Intentions. If these titles are going to persist, might I inquire that they function more like the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man rather than fellow 2024 titles like Bob Marley: One Love or A Complete Unknown? Before walking into this Michael Gracey directorial effort, I didn’t know Robbie Williams from Jarvis Crocker or Gaz. While Better Man doesn’t shed all the annoying fixtures of music biopics, it certainly seared Williams into my brain.
Right away, Gracey, Oliver Cole, and Simon Gleeson's Better Man screenplay hit the ground running nicely by unabashedly embracing a delightfully weird visual: Robbie Williams will be portrayed in this movie as a CG ape. Everyone else treats him like a normal human, but Williams is a bipedal ape who talks and acts like a person. Nobody makes quippy dialogue winking at this attribute, nor is there narration hand-holding to make this oddball detail go down smoother. It’s an appropriate bravura choice for a musician whose entire stage persona has been about exuding a “take-it-or-leave-it” persona.
From his childhood, Williams has been plagued by self-hatred and doubts. He’s also persistently put on an aggressive brash and conceited exterior to cover up those insecurities. Williams believes that people hating him is so inevitable that he might as well give them something to detest. This psyche endures from a childhood defined by an absent father, Peter (Steve Pemberton), who abandoned Williams to pursue a showbiz career. At the age of 15, Williams got a big break performing in the boy band Take That. That gig eventually culminated in an addiction-ridden William becoming a liability for the band, with the musician subsequently pursuing a solo career.
On his own, Williams scored countless number-one hits, anchored a slew of sold-out concerts, and married fellow musician Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno). He also becomes a monster, molded by the fires of trauma, depression, and addiction, seeking out fame and quick bursts of serotonin to cope with the aching emptiness in his soul. In a stark departure from his glossy family-friendly work on The Greatest Showman, Gracey depicts the darkest parts of Williams like a horror movie. Past versions of Williams constantly torment the singer, glowering at him from crowds of adulating fans. Among those past versions is simian Williams sans skin, an especially unnerving sight to see.
Gracey’s Better Man creative vision oscillates wildly between the brutal and fantastical, which is just the kind of tonal swing I adore. One minute, Better Man is depicting Williams and his mom cheerfully celebrating this singer getting into Take That by dancing across their neighborhood, now illuminated by a glittery disco ball. Later, this same movie will make you believe a CG ape can do heroin on-screen. It’s a wild ride, but also one that, in its own strange way, captures the realistic ups and downs of mental health struggles. Coping with depression and other mental disorders is an erratic experience that can’t fit into a tidy package.
The outsized tonal shifts and imagery in Better Man reflect that facet in a memorable fashion. Meanwhile, Erik A. Wilson's cinematography and especially the deeply precise editing (credited to a whole team of artists, including Jeff Groth and Spencer Susser) turn the world of music stardom into a hideous nightmare. The excess of 2022’s underrated masterwork Babylon and the Edgar Wright rapid-fire cuts come together to make sequences chronicling Williams “on top of the world” into psychological mayhem. It’s especially impressive to see these qualities intersect with some of the musician’s most famous performances.
Other music biopics depict iconic live exhibitions from singers with rigid recreations. Concerts once informed by chaotic excitement are brought to the screen with few unique flourishes. Now they’re just here to remind people of the past, not find new ways to create that energy in the here and now. Better Man’s depiction of a 2003 Knebworth concert anchored by Williams alone leaves that tendency in the dust. This sequence is rife with trippy and creepy imagery (including depictions of Williams literally fighting with himself) that are exclusive to Better Man. Creative audacity put Williams on the map as a musician. Now it informs the greatest set pieces of his biopic.
Speaking of that subgenre, Better Man, despite its most enjoyably maximalist digressions, can’t fully escape the gravitational pull of many music biopic genre cliché. A heavy reliance on montage sequences to communicate significant passages of time (namely one chronicling the relationship between Williams and Appleton), for instance, has a mixed track record. Even the better entries in this domain suffer from trying to cover too many real-life events in one movie. Better Man also tragically succumbs to that shortcoming. Ham-fisted dialogue, especially curt words exchanged between the film’s central father/son duo, also harkens too much back to “the wrong kid died!”
An overly tidy ending, meanwhile, tragically caps off a jagged feature that previously felt like the coked-up cousin to Walk the Line or Bohemian Rhapsody. Even the depiction of lingering mental health struggles for Williams feels a bit too organized considering what preceded it. What a shame it ends with something that feels like a concession to mainstream sensibilities. Operating within the music biopic world, there’s only so much even a CG ape or an anarchic rocker like Robbie Williams can do. Luckily, Better Man soars in some truly exceptional ways, including committing to a CG monkey star.
The greatest compliment I can offer Better Man is that watching this digital primate having sex with human women, engaging in intimate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-style domestic squabbles, and doing drugs didn’t inspire titters from yours truly. I just bought it. Whether it’s the rock-solid visual effects (courtesy of Weta FX) or just Better Man’s utter confidence in committing to going bananas with its protagonist, I never blinked twice at following an ape for two hours. Very quickly, that just became Robbie Williams. It’s a great trick to watch unfold and a terrific demonstration of how digital effects wizardry can be used to enhance more intimate affairs than, say, Black Adam.
It's also a welcome relief to say that Gracey repents for the visually slipshod nature of The Greatest Showman’s musical numbers by delivering an absolute masterstroke of a musical set piece within Better Man within a grand restaging of the Williams tune “Better DJ.” Taking place over what’s supposed to be a single take, Robbie Williams and his fellow Take Out band members sing, dance, and gyrate all around London in celebratory triumph. The sequence is told through crisp camerawork that pulls back to let audiences absorb lots and lots of lively dance choreography. It’s the kind of imaginative and visually creative sequence you just won’t find in any typical music biopic. Alternatively, for a party, you can’t help tapping your feet to and a deeply raw artistic exercise, Better Man is worth going ape for.