The ingenious Robbie Williams biopic is a showbiz landmark.
How brilliant is Better Man? Imagine all those ideas on identity, fate, talent, libido, and self-referential consciousness in the screwball comedy Being John Malkovich remade into a movie musical about British pop star Robbie Williams. It starts daringly, with Williams confessing, “How I really see myself: narcissistic, punchable.” And then we see that self-image: a hairy, big-eared chimpanzee with dagger-like incisors, a wiry torso, trim buttocks, and an intense stare, but who winks.
This high-concept auto-biopic, from a screenplay that Australian director Michael Gracey co-wrote with Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson, stirs more real feeling about evolution than even Charlie Kaufman’s Malkovich script. Young chimp Robbie awkwardly sings along with his pop-loving dad, eventually connecting primitive behavior to the problems of modern celebrity. We see the need for attention and affection, as well as fame’s misdirection into anarchic, destructive habits and deceptive egotism. At the height of Robbie’s fame, a concerned family member asks, “How can you not know who you are when thousands of people are screaming your name?” It’s a terrific screenplay.
By never breaking the anthropoid conceit — keeping Williams a chimp from working-class childhood obscurity to adult pop-stardom — Better Man evolves into the most honest and exploratory showbiz movie ever made. Through the figure of Robbie Williams, who always shows a glint of dark Celtic mischief, Gracey explores the same combination of instincts and insecurities that distinguished the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy and avoids sentimental mythologizing. Williams says, “My DNA is cabaret — Sinatra’s ‘My Way.’” He refers to Sinatra, Sammy Davis, and Dean Martin as “the gods” and says, “They make other people’s problems go away.” His own problems get complicated with his debut in the boy-band phenomenon Take That.
Gracey traces Robbie’s history with behind-the-scenes wit (Williams singing backup to his golden-boy rival Gary Barlow) and irrepressible monkey shines (“Always appear attainable,” Take That’s manager encourages, whether performing at gay clubs or for adolescent girls.) Elton John’s Rocket Man and Freddie Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody were never this sharp or cheeky. George Michael’s travails deserve to be seen so clearly.
“These are my people! I felt like Elvis!” grins simian Williams, and when he gets his first solo hit, Gracey outdoes Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, from 2022. The original music video for Williams’s “Rock DJ” was a macabre fantasy where the audience-pleasing star stripped naked, then skinned himself down, revealing his muscular and skeletal systems — a wry, sci-fi comment on pop sacrifice. Here, Gracey stages an epic, one-take street extravaganza that celebrates Williams’s success. The elaborate choreography and colorful vision match Vincente Minnelli’s style but underneath carry a delirious energy equal to Ken Russell’s maddest visions of neurotic excess. This could be the insight Gracey aimed for and missed in his P. T. Barnum film The Greatest Showman. But watching Better Man’s meta conceit, we become doubly aware of the icon’s desperation.
At the heart of this Darwinian joke, Williams experiences deep ambivalence. Leaving Barlow’s mansion in a fit of envy, he drives away into red-tinted road rage, plunges off the road, then underwater and under ice — another Russell-worthy vision of self-destruction by which the film shows Williams’s psyche. The subsequent plot turn toward Williams’s fling with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) perfectly balances romantic melodrama and the shock of adulthood: Appleton’s abortion fuels Williams’s dejection, triggering the unresolved filial relationship with his distant, showbiz-loving father (Steve Pemberton) whose humor he learned and borrowed. Gracey steadily checks Williams’s sarcasm and self-pity with comments from family and friends that are often rude or just piercing vernacular.
Throughout the film’s ape act (performed by actor Jonno Davies), musical numbers convey everything Williams learns — about self-expression (“songs only matter if they cost you something”) and the awareness he put into the compositions “She’s the One” and his biggest hit, “Angels,” about the confidence instilled by his grandmother (Alison Steadman, from Mike Leigh’s heartfelt-strivers universe). During his career highpoint — signing an 80-million-pound contract with EMI, singing “Let Me Entertain You” before 125, 000 fans at Knebworth stadium — Williams is haunted by images of himself at his monkey-worst. He is more dangerous and emotionally naked than in that “Rock DJ” video.
Better Man illuminates the illusion of fame. But it also explores the definition of character that has become so politicized, falsified, and misunderstood lately. Robbie Williams Primate observes, “They say your life freezes when you become famous. So I’m 15: Stunted, unevolved.” Such a confession sheds every sense of vanity and keeps Better Man true to a pop star’s real charm.
The only thing to be improved about Better Man is the title (not to be confused with A Different Man, the repugnant indie film about deformity). This amazingly non-narcissistic auto-biopic deserves the title of Williams’s 1998 album The Ego Has Landed.