Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: So, you take the traditional musical biopic like A Complete Unknown or Walk the Line, but instead of casting some popular actor like Lil’ Timmy Chalamet or Joaq Phoenix to play the subject, you instead have the musician played by a computer-generated monkey. Yeah, me neither. But that’s what we have in Better Man, a musical biopic about British crooner Robbie Williams.
Wait, who?
If you walked up to me in a dark parking lot and threatened me with grievous and immediate bodily injury if I can’t name five Robbie Williams songs I’d be so screwed because I can’t name a single one. I guess I’ve heard that song “She’s the One” before, but I’m pretty sure I heard a cover of it or it was in a movie. Which is crazy because, by all accounts, Robbie Williams is massive.
He was in the boy band Take That from 1990 to 1995, which reached massive levels of cultural saturation in the United Kingdom, but had zero presence in the United States compared to the likes of the Backstreet Boys or ’N Sync. But it was when Williams started a solo career in 1996 that he truly became a superstar.
Just a few factoids: He has seven No.1 singles, almost all of his albums have reached No. 1 in the U.K., six of those albums are in the top 100 best-selling albums in the U.K., and, in a single day, he sold 1.6 million tickets for a tour. Oh, and he was inducted into the U.K. music hall of fame 20 years ago after being voted the greatest artist of the 1990s. He’s also sold 75 million records worldwide, making him one of the all-time best selling musicians. So why the hell haven’t I heard of him? Have you?
Well, after watching Better Man and hearing what I would imagine is a good sampling of his music throughout the film, I think maybe he’s just not for me. He has a very smooth, nightclub-crooner voice like he’s desperately hoping to be in the same conversation as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin once he passes. He has talent as a songwriter, but I’m not sure he’s 75 million records talented. In fact, the soundtrack to this movie has already debuted at No. 1 in the U.K., so Williams isn’t some ’90s has-been. He’s a massive British institution.
Better Man as a film is a knockout. Even though I didn’t love most of the music, director Michael Gracey is astonishing in his work here, telling a deeply personal story of one man’s rise to fame, but putting that man in the middle of thousands of screaming fans at almost every turn. It’s massive in scale, while never once forgetting to see the toll that level of celebrity takes on the man. Williams’s struggles with depression, anxiety, mental illness, and addiction are prototypical for the rockstar experience, but the film doesn’t make him into some tortured genius desperate to quiet the demons. Instead, it lays Williams bare as a flawed and intermittently broken man who was still just a terrified little boy underneath the bravado.
But why a computer-generated anthropomorphized chimpanzee? So many reasons. The one that Williams and the filmmakers mention in interviews is that Williams always “felt less evolved” than other people, which is a solid reason, but that’s not why it works in the movie. See, Williams is really good-looking and has an extremely punchable face. He has been rich and famous since he was 15, so empathy for this rich and handsome white guy might be hard to summon for a worldwide audience. But by putting his story of addiction and depression into that of an adorable CG chimpanzee with deeply expressive eyes, that’s creating a social experiment: Can you make millions of people feel sorry for someone’s circumstances if you make their appearance more appealing?
Now I want this to become a musical biopic trend. Let me pitch a few ideas at you and maybe Hollywood will start blowing up my landline.
• The early days of Janis Joplin but instead of Anya Taylor-Joy, she’s a big ol’ owl.
• A remake of The Doors, but “Lizard King” Jim Morrison is an actual lizard.
• The life of Dolly Parton played by an adorable kitten that grows into a majestic kitty.
• Prince…but played by a water-dancing grebe.
• A honey badger IS Kurt Cobain.
Look, these are million-dollar ideas and Robbie Williams shouldn’t be the only artist to get to be an animal.
Better Man is a great movie and a thousand times more illuminating than A Complete Unknown and most other biopics. It’s definitely going to flop in the U.S. because no one knows or cares about Robbie Williams here. Gracey is one hell of a director, crafting a dozen moments throughout the film that actually took my breath away and put tears to my eyes. Also, the computer-generated chimp is astonishing, generating more human emotion in his eyes than some real actors I won’t name (*cough* Taylor Lautner). Go see Better Man because it’s a better movie than you probably think.
Grade: A-
