When Robbie Williams told an interviewer he felt like an actor’s monkey, he didn’t mean it literally. But that’s exactly how “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey interpreted the remark in “Better Man,” an unconventional musical biopic that would have been perfectly normal—not exactly cheesy—if it had featured a real-life actor in the role of Robbie Williams.
Gracie takes the audience through every expected beat of Williams’ career, from his breakthrough as a member of Take That to his record-breaking solo gig at Knebworth, but he does so with an animated chimpanzee who represents the bad boy of British pop. Despite the odds, the gimmick works, setting the project apart from many other pop star biopics. If you want to fawn over the band’s backup singer-turned-solo star for four hours, check out the Netflix documentary series Robbie Williams. But if you want to see a chimpanzee snort cocaine with Oasis, or get a fateful handjob from manager Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman), this is your movie.
By subbing in what looks very much like Caesar from the new and improved Planet of the Apes films in Williams’ place, Gracie dodges the main question people ask about musicals — “Who’s going to play him?” So if you’re worried about the whole chimp thing getting distracting, don’t forget how crazy it feels to pretend that Elton John’s life would have been the same if he looked like Taron Egerton, or that a pair of false teeth could turn Rami Malek into the swaggering penis that was Freddie Mercury.
Lately, films like “Stardust,” “Back to Black,” and even “Elvis” have been marginalized by the gap we felt between their lead actors and the pop icons they were supposed to embody. “Better Man,” by contrast, falls into that uncanny valley, and for once, that’s a good thing. For one, Americans don’t really know who Williams is, making it easy to accept whatever Gracie puts in his shoes. Better yet, his animated simian counterpart proves to be more expressive than most of the human actors, meaning the film is built around an animated performance strong enough to draw tears.
On “Better Man,” the musical maestro adds ridiculously complex technical challenges to his resume—like the jaw-dropping “Rock DJ” sequence set on London’s busy Regent Street, shot over four days and stitched together to look like one unbroken shot, or the “Come Undone” sequence in which he speeds away from a boy band breakup, nearly crashes his car into an oncoming bus and is engulfed in a sea of photographers. These numbers deliver essential emotional information in unimaginably dynamic ways, blowing traditional music-setters to the dust.
But “The Better Man” suffers from the same problem that plagues nearly all pop-star pictures: Rather than picking out a significant chapter in their characters’ lives, these biopics usually take a cradle-to-grave (or cradle-to-rehab, as the case may be) approach. That works for documentaries, but when it comes to dramatic retellings, the strategy forces the world’s most interesting characters to follow familiar paths: first they show natural talent, then they get discovered, then they become insanely rich and famous, before sabotaging it all with addiction, dishonesty and ego. And if they’re lucky, they don’t overdose, confirming to ordinary people everywhere that they’re better off not being famous.
“The Better Man” wants to be like “All That Jazz,” but it relies on a redemptive life story formula, presenting Robbie as a boy—or, in this case, a teenage chimpanzee—who is much skinnier (and much hairier) than his peers. Young Robbie is bad at sports, worse at school, but a natural clown, as he learns in a school play. Robbie gets his badassery from his father, a cabaret comedian (stage name Peter Conway, played here by Steve Pemberton) who leaves home to pursue his showbiz dreams when Robbie is just a boy.
The truth is more complicated, but a man with developmental delays and a search for his father’s approval makes Williams a relatable character. Gracie interviewed the star at length about his life, then built the narrative he wanted to tell with co-writers Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole. Williams’ angle is frustratingly familiar, though the execution is absolutely stunning—we’re talking Wachowski’s ingenuity as Gracie crafts a sophisticated montage where you can’t even notice the cuts.
Consider the scene where Williams learns that his most rebellious supporter has died, before he can perform his biggest show. The camera opens with a close-up of Robbie’s eyes, then zooms out to reveal his face hanging upside down above the stage, swiveling 180 degrees as he soars above the heads of several thousand fans. His eyes are the best part of this scene—and every other. They make all the difference: a dazzling green, designed to look more human than chimpanzee. Gracie’s visual effects team (led by Weta’s Luke Millar and Andy Taylor) studied hours of archive footage to get the singer’s facial expressions just right, so that every wink, wink, and scowl matched Robbie’s real face.
Williams occasionally resorts to swearing and profanity without warning, a disrespectful trait that Gracie cleverly recreates here, placing chimps in familiar photo shoots. He even stages a version of the music video for “Rock DJ,” in which Williams strips down to his guts. The ape icon that he embodies goes through a dizzying range of emotions over the course of the film, from admiration for fellow pop star Nicole Appleton (Rachel Banno) to devastation over her decision to abort their child for the sake of a hit song. Even his bisexuality is fair game, making “Better Man” a better film than “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The same goes for his clinical depression, even if the deadly duel between all his different personalities (which unfolds like “War for the Planet of the Apes”) takes his self-destructive tendencies a little too far.
No matter how dark Williams is, he remains an undeniably charming character, and that appeal is compounded by the ape character. Frankly, Gracie’s portrayal of the chimpanzee was always a stretch, because the “performing ape” description only applies when Williams is doing someone else’s bidding. Behind the animated ape is a real actor, Juno Davis, who did his toughest scenes on set, including much of Ashley Whalen’s innovative choreography. It’s hard to say how much of Davis’ work still stands, though the animation that ultimately came out is so good that the Academy needs to find the right category to recognize it.
