I have written in this space more than once in the past year (including just two weeks ago) about the state of one of Hollywood’s hoariest formulas: the music biopic. More often than not (and increasingly in this age of IP), this genre tends to function as a cinematic wax museum, overly glossy distillations of complex lives, frequently sanitized by the musicians or their heirs– see last year’s One Love or Back to Black. On the other end of the spectrum are the films which step outside the box, eschewing the tropes of the genre to cut to the heart of what makes their subjects’ music special: Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell (as well as, it seems, his upcoming indie rock fantasia Pavements). This latter strain exists largely as a response to the former; the two are constantly in conversation, but are generically distinct.
Mostly, anyway. I have seen Better Man, the new biopic of UK pop star Robbie Williams, and I’m honestly not sure which category to file it under. In most formal ways that count, it is a fairly standard music biopic. It follows the arc of Williams’ life and music in crowdpleasing narrative terms, from his hardscrabble childhood in Stoke-on-Trent to his breakout in the oh-so-’90s boy band Take That, and on through the highs and lows of his solo career. All the standard biopic beats are hit right on schedule: the childhood dreams, the dizzying rise to fame, the spiral into substance abuse, the daddy issues and other insecurities which made him feel like a failure even while he was at the top of the world. Better Man plays the hits both figuratively and literally; for the most part, it is quintessential of its genre.
For the most part.
There is one aspect of Better Man, you see, which separates it from the Walk the LInes and Complete Unknowns of the world, for which it will likely be remembered and talked about long after similar films are forgotten and consigned to the streaming menus of history. Since the dawn of cinema, the vast majority of music biopics have relied on the admittedly pedestrian technique of casting “human actors” in the lead roles. Better Man, to put it mildly, forgoes this tradition, opting instead to portray Robbie Williams as a photorealistic CGI chimpanzee.
No, really.
This decision is never explained, nor is it remarked upon by the ape’s human costars. One might expect Williams, who narrates and provides the voice of his simian avatar, to spell out the subtext at the outset– “I’ve always seen myself as a dancing monkey,” or something like that– but he doesn’t. Nor does the film make any jokes about the fact its star is a bipedal ape– no monkey puns, no bananas, no frustrated manager screaming “You’re acting like an animal!” Better Man plays it absolutely straight; Robbie Williams is a talking chimpanzee, and you’re just going to have to keep up.
And you know what? It works. So fully committed to the bit is Better Man that it only takes a few minutes to acclimate, and by the end you’ll likely have to remind yourself that there’s anything unusual going on at all. What’s odd here is that the film’s eccentricity works hand in hand with its more conventional elements: the conceit is so weird that we forgive its tropes, and the storytelling is so slick that we accept its fundamental strangeness. The result is something of an optical illusion, a film which should not be, yet is remarkably successful at being what it is.
As an American, I have a genetic immunity to Robbie Williams as a cultural entity; it’s not that I don’t like his music, necessarily, just that it has absolutely no bearing on me personally. Yet even I have to admit to getting caught up somewhat in Better Man’s jukebox musical brio. Credit here is due to director Michael Gracey, whose insanely popular The Greatest Showman is probably the high water mark for big, dumb, mainstream movie musicals in the 21st century. I know nothing of Gracey personally, but I imagine him as a sort of indefatigable Vaudeville song-and-dance man, the kind of entertainer who will do anything and everything to win an audience over. Better Man is so big and loud and brashly energetic that it’s difficult not to enjoy, even if one doesn’t give a lick about the music itself.
Yet there is one more element to this film’s curious alchemy. Once you strip past Gracey’s razzle-dazzle and the cartoon monkey of it all, it becomes apparent that Better Man is, improbably, one of the most self-lacerating biopics ever made. Perhaps freed by the distance created by the film’s special effects, Williams is brutally honest about his struggles with substance abuse and bipolar depression. The latter is strikingly represented by harrowing scenes in which Williams sees visions of his past selves snarling and hurling insults at him (as anyone who’s seen Nope can attest, an angry chimp can be fucking terrifying). Officially licensed biopics tend to be sanitized affairs, the ugly bits sanded off to better fit the estate-approved narrative. There’s probably a little bit of that here as well (as I said, I’m far from an expert in Williamsology), but one senses that this one is more honest than most, despite– or perhaps because of– the direct involvement of Williams himself.
So what does one make of Better Man? I can’t say I walked out of it with a greater love for Williams’ music (for better or for worse, I remain a Yank), but the fact that I went in the first place– and enjoyed myself!– is evidence that the film is a resounding success. Better Man probably would have been a solid biopic even if Gracey and Williams had played it straight, but its gimmick is the sort of wild-ass swing-for-the-fences weirdness which I can’t help but applaud. I would support an entire cinematic universe of Britpop icons reimagined as cartoon jungle creatures; I can easily imagine a sloth Jarvis Cocker, or Elastica’s Justine Frischmann as a dryly sarcastic ostrich. As it stands, Better Man is a truly bonkers original, a jolt of vision to a moribund genre. Whether it’s a better or worse film than A Complete Unknown will be a matter of taste, but it objectively has 100% more talking chimpanzees, which in my book will make it a clear victor every time.
Better Man
2024
dir. Michael Gracey
134 min.
Now Playing at AMCs Boston Common, Causeway, Assembly Row, and South Bay
