Don’t think of Better Man as a music biopic — it’s a must-see fantasy spectacle

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

For American audiences, at least, the movie musical Better Man is a fairly hard sell. It’s an odd-sounding project — a music biopic with the leading man replaced by a CG chimp, built around the career of an international superstar and former boy-band member who’s never really broken through in the States. Americans don’t share the rest of the world’s fascination with pop singer Robbie Williams, in spite of his 14 chart-topping albums, regular presence in U.K. tabloids, and cheeky, viral-friendly music videos. (Note: 107 million views on that video alone, and it isn’t even close to his most-viewed hit, “Angels.”) So the idea of a biopic might not have any instant appeal for U.S. viewers, even with that “ape protagonist” gimmick adding some intrigue.

But while the movie is drawn from Williams’ life, it’s still better to think of it as a fantasy feature. Director Michael Gracey previously turned P.T. Barnum’s career into the rousing, ultra-popular musical movie The Greatest Showman, while glossing over or revising most of the reality of Barnum’s life and work. While Better Man comes closer to the truth about Williams’ history, it similarly plays with image and emotion over facts, particularly when it comes to the music. Just as Gracey replaces Williams with an ape for a variety of reasons (more on that in a bit), he fictionalizes and broadens his subject’s story. More significantly, though, he tells the story through fantasy sequences so bold, expressive, and visually startling that the effects dominate the movie. 

Actor Jonno Davies plays Williams throughout the movie for mo-cap purposes, as he grows up as a swaggering, attention-hungry showoff in a tense working-class household. He gets his first shot of national fame as a teenager, when producer Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) picks him for manufactured boy band Take That, which rockets to massive success. (Time later described the fandom around the band as “the 90s’ version of Beatlemania.”)

The usual behind-the-scenes drama follows: depression, substance abuse, arrogance and alienation, a bottoming-out, a recovery and revival. But the basic beats don’t matter as much as the way Gracey depicts them, through bravura sequences where Williams and his cohorts travel through a spinning, mutating fantasy version of London’s Regent Street, or with zombie-like hordes of paparazzi attacking Williams underwater, in a set-piece straight out of Aquaman’s Trench fight.

Better Man is openly constructed more around Williams’ emotional experience of his life than around a sober reconstruction of its events: Presumably he never actually fought 110,000 versions of himself in a gory, over-the-top battle royale set to “Let Me Entertain You.” If nothing else, timeline nitpickers may break out in hives over the way music from throughout Williams’ career is used to represent emotional moments from entirely different parts of his history. But the full-throated fantasy approach lets Gracey escape the usual queasy questions about fidelity to truth in a biopic. When your leading man is an ape operating in a human world, how could anyone miss that the approach is more about image and sensation than about factual precision?

That central conceit, of Robbie Williams as a monkey-man among humans, gives Gracey a lot of extra visual appeal, but it also serves as a potent metaphor. He and Williams have given different reasons for the approach: In the film itself, Williams just says he’s always seen himself as “a little less evolved” than other people. In other interviews, Gracey has talked about wanting to distance the audience from reality so they’ll better accept the unreality of a musical, or about simply needing a gimmick to avoid making just another samey biopic.

And ahead of the movie’s release, Williams and Gracey released a video clip where they offer a completely different reason: Gracey says he was inspired by Williams griping about “being dragged up on stage to perform like a monkey,” and he decided to make that idea literal and tangible. 

But aside from those justifications, presenting Better Man’s subject as a literal animal, a different creature from everyone around him, lets Gracey lean on the themes of Williams’ alienation and sense of separation. Whether the barrier is his bottomless hunger for attention, the way he struggles with drugs and alcohol while his boy-band peers seem physically and emotionally healthier, the way his fame distances him from his family and former friends, or just the way he constantly yearns for approval from a father who’s busy chasing his own form of fame, Williams is set apart from the world. Framing the movie around the most self-deprecating, instinct-driven version of his self-image underlines the point in every shot, without the need for exposition.

And there’s a destructive, animalistic side to the ape image as well. Wētā FX, the effects house behind the Planet of the Apes movies, gives Williams an expressive and believable chimp face and a detailed chimp pelt, but keeps his body language and physical form largely human. Still, there’s an atavistic danger to Williams’ angry or fearful moments on the screen, as he beats his chest or bares his fangs. In those moments, he feels far more dangerous to those around him, and far less in control, than any human character.

All of that, plus the ambitiously wild musical sequences, leaves Better Man as a spectacle movie worthy of sharing multiplexes and audiences with Wicked. It’s seemingly designed more for fans of immersive, Wētā-centric fantasy worlds like the Planet of the Apes or Lord of the Rings movies than it’s aimed at fans of pop music history — or even of Williams himself. (Netflix has a four-part documentary on Williams’ life and career for those looking for a more factually driven approach.) By the end, viewers may be curious to learn more about Williams as a performer and personality, or to dig deeper into his discography.

But the Better Man experience is more akin to watching a standout Bollywood musical or a Baz Luhrmann spectacular like Moulin Rouge! than to watching an episode of Behind the Music. Most musicals translate emotion into song. This one takes that a step further, translating emotion into a daring central gimmick. It’s experimental and explosive. Even for those with no investment in Williams’ work or previous knowledge of his career, it’s worth the watch just to see how Gracey fills the screen with energy and verve, with mesmerizing staging designed to overwhelm the audience’s senses and ensure that they walk out singing. 

Better Man is in theaters now.