Prime, Mate! — Better Man
As I noted in my recent review of A Complete Unknown, I am not a fan of modern pop music. I find the vast majority of it to be inherently shallow, mass-produced, often devoid of anything meaningful to say, and far more focused on corporate branding and sexuality than anything should be if you want to sincerely call it “art” or the performers “artists.” That said, there have always been exceptions. I can usually find at least one song from every big name act that I can tolerate if not outright enjoy, and there are a fair few singers I’ve pretty much always liked, mostly because they do these weird things like write their own music, perform with sincerity, and aspire to do more than just shake their tits and ass on MTV. Among those I favor are Shakira, Kelly Clarkson (though obviously I in no way endorse American Idol; I firmly believe she would have made it even without a televised karaoke contest), P!nk, and most relevant for our purposes here, Robbie Williams.
I remember growing up in the 90s and seeing Take That videos. I didn’t really care for the group, feeling the same way about them as I did every other boyband I’d ever heard (I grew out of my New Kids on the Block phase FAST once I hit the age of 10), and every time my clock radio played “Back for Good,” it got me out of bed just so I could shut it off (the shoddy thing only picked up two stations, the “adult contemporary” and a hyper-Christian one). But once Williams went solo, I really started getting into his stuff, particularly the songs “Angels” and “Millennium.” While I haven’t followed his career obsessively, whenever he pops up on my screen, it puts a smile on my face. To this day, my favorite performance of his is an appearance on The Graham Norton Show (I think), where he did a brass-heavy, jazzy cover of “I Wan’na to Be Like You” from The Jungle Book. If you ever see it, you can tell that he’s truly having fun and leaning into the musicality and the silliness of the number. It’s kind of infectious.
Imagine my surprise — and acknowledgement of propriety — when Better Man was announced. A singer who’d been through the wringer, telling an admittedly exaggerated and fanciful version of his life story, featuring himself represented as a chimpanzee? It was perfectly him. Even if I’d never seen that televised turn of him covering a literal “Monkey Song,” it still would have made perfect sense despite being objectively weird. Sadly, the film has not been a hit, making back only about 10% of its budget so far, an unfortunate side effect of the absolute glut of releases this past December. It just got lost in the shuffle, which is a shame because the movie, while containing some familiar plotting, is a fantastic and unique take on the musical biopic, one that solidifies the very reasons I appreciate his work.
It only makes sense to start by addressing the elephant, er, chimp in the room, and talk about the main gimmick: Robbie as an ape. Born of the idea that he’s always considered himself a little “less evolved” than most people, the trick is executed by actor Jonno Davies performing in motion capture, with the animalistic features animated on with CGI. Williams (mostly) provides his own voice as an adult, with additional help from Adam Tucker and Carter J. Murphy filling in dialogue for younger versions of himself. The film is shortlisted for the Visual Effects Oscar for this tactic, and honestly, it’s done really well. There’s a slight sheen of fakeness in the rendering, but honestly I’d rather have that than Uncanny Valley freakishness. While you’ll rarely be convinced that a chimpanzee is talking, you can still tell that there’s someone actually there on the set, interacting with the other performers and the environment, and that goes a long way towards allowing the viewer to suspend disbelief for the 5% artificial glow. Plus the design has more life, energy, and personality than every “live action” Lion King character combined, which definitely helps
More importantly, though, the effect serves two crucial points in the overall story. For one, no one ever draws attention to it, not even Robbie (aside from the aforementioned evolution line). When Robbie’s grandmother Betty (Alison Steadman) gives the child Robbie a bath and says she wouldn’t change a hair on his head, it’s not just a sweet sentiment from a loving relative, it’s also a reinforcement of the insecurity that comes from feeling like you’re too different from everyone else, like you just don’t fit in. No one on the screen sees the simian, but we still get the message that he feels like an outcast, like there’s something drastic that separates him from his peers. The second part of this, which extends from the first, is that the ape is allowed to represent not only his self-doubt, but his primal angst, as Robbie’s growth and career trajectory are always met with hallucinations of his previous beastly forms that antagonize with a constant barrage of self-destructive insults and threats.
This is a concept that so easily could have backfired and rendered the picture as kitsch, but it’s used in such a smart way to propel the story without being an exercise in “look what we can do” tech stroking. Because Robbie sees his life as an attempt to rise above the hand that “nature” (read: economic circumstances and a lack of social mobility) has dealt him, we get to see a constant physical manifestation of his challenges, and eventual acceptance of himself as being good enough.
You see this throughout the movie, and it helps to subvert the more tropey trappings of the music biography subgenre. When his father Peter (Steve Pemberton) leaves the family to pursue a living as a small-time lounge entertainer, the primate Robbie thinks he’s done something to screw things up, that he’s unworthy of his father’s affection. And yet, this isn’t some maudlin story about trying to win daddy’s love, just his recognition. He doesn’t want the perfect family life he lost, just the acknowledgement that he always had the “it” factor to do something extraordinary. Peter finds happiness in his small success, but Robbie wants more so that he can have that feeling that the sacrifice was worth it. His dad reconciled that in his own mind, but Robbie can’t, even though his star rises far higher.
When Robbie auditions for Take That, and when he eventually dates Nicole Appleton of the girl group All Saints (played here by Raechelle Banno), the jungle façade helps portray his disdain for the plastic fakeness of the pop scene. He knows he’s the “ugly” one in the group, only involved because of his “bad boy” swagger, and he’s never taken seriously as a singer or songwriter. Despite his whirlwind romance with Appleton, when she makes a decision that ultimately dooms the relationship, it’s presented as a choice to further her manufactured bubblegum career, and you can sense the self-loathing and Robbie’s resentment about how it might relate to him as a person, further crushing his sense of personal worth.
And of course, there’s the climactic performance at Knebworth, where all his ambitions culminate in what should be a whirlwind moment of victory and self-actualization in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, it’s a battle in his mind against his own demons, one depicted in graphic and literal terms, driving him to finally deal with his myriad issues. In most films like this, the concert would be the crescendo to go out on right before the credit roll. Here, it’s the realization that everything he ever wanted still didn’t cleanse him of his anger, instead becoming a breaking point where his turmoil reduces him to his most base form. It’s fucking brilliant, and entirely unexpected.
It all works because Williams states upfront that this is about interpretation of events, a recontextualization, rather than a straight chronology of his life and work. Many major moments and musical numbers are pure fantasy, but they’re dazzling fantasies that properly convey the emotional significance of these personal milestones. It’s also a chance to offer new meaning to what he’s been able to accomplish thus far, giving us an insight into his bombastic mental state to supplement what we already know. For instance, “Angels” has always been a gut-wrencher of a ballad, but it’s given even more weight here. Whether that weight is factually accurate doesn’t matter a whit compared to the spirit of the message he’s trying to convey. And believe me, after what I went through with my mother over the last several years, this whole sequence is opened with a moment that just destroyed me. By the time it was over, I couldn’t distinguish the raindrops on screen from my own tears.
Despite the heavier set pieces, however, there’s also a great deal of humor and lightheartedness, as director Michael Gracey (who helmed The Greatest Showman) takes this premise for all it’s worth. The scale alternates between intimacy and grandeur. He gets just as much mileage out of a fast-paced one-take musical number as he does a running gag where one of Robbie’s neighbors heckles him from two houses down, only to be met with a joyous, “Fuck off!” While Gracey’s previous outing was far from a great film, the sheer energy went a long way to making it palatable and even occasionally enjoyable, and he employs that same joie de vivre here.
This is down to Williams’ overriding philosophy. Not once that I can recall does he call himself an “artist.” Instead, as he often screams, he’s “a fucking entertainer.” That defiant distinction comes through in every single frame. In that sense, Better Man serves as a companion piece to A Complete Unknown (and honestly the more original film of the two), as Bob Dylan rarely calls himself an “artist” or even a “musician,” opting for “poet” more often than not. In the end, this is a movie about finally understanding exactly who you are, warts and all, and celebrating it. It may not have found its audience (yet), but for those who take the time, you will be thoroughly entertained, and that was always the entire bloody point. Cheeky monkey.
Grade: A
Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? What’s the weirdest gimmick you’ve ever seen in a biopic? What’s your guilty pleasure music? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on January 20, 2025.
