‘Better Man’, the craziest musical of the year

Trying to describe the Robbie Williams biopic Better manyou sound like a lunatic.
Photo: Paramount Pictures

“The energy I’ve put into being a showman is: ‘Fuck, this is the biggest hoax ever, people will find out in the next three seconds…'” This is how British pop star Robbie Williams once described his attitude towards performing. “They’ll find out! Move! Keep moving! Do some things! Do some things!” Williams said this around 2016, well into a discography that had already endured several waves of mega-superstardom. His words speak to an anxious, persistent need not just to entertain, but to distract, to overplay, to keep the audience free from moorings, all in an attempt to hide deep and intractable feelings of inadequacy.

Now he has gone and made a film about it – a film which not only depicts but also embodies this feeling. Better man gives us an occasionally fictionalized overview of Robbie Williams’ life and career, from his beginnings as a show-offy working-class kid from Stoke-on-Trent (the “robber end of the north of England”) to his unlikely stardom as a member of the 1990’s ern boy band Take That, to his stratospheric success as a solo artist. The film hits all the expected pit stops of addiction and alcoholism and heartbreak and egomania along the way. But it does so with a blazing, restless ingenuity that goes beyond mere sensationalism to something downright pathological. We sense behind the screen the terror of someone who still worries that we’ll find out he’s been bluffing all along.

To be clear, Better man is directed by Michael Gracey – and boy, is it ever – but Williams has certainly exercised his share of creative control. The film marinates in his trickster theater kid spirit. The singer voices himself in this biopic, while motion capture actor Jonno Davies plays him as a British boy with the face of (no joke) a CGI monkey. Presenting the picture at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Gracey and Williams noted that the monkey idea came from the director asking his subject early on what kind of animal he saw himself as. The singer first replied, “A lion,” then realized he wasn’t kidding anyone and admitted that he saw himself as a monkey—a wild performer, whether in the service of others or for his own egomaniacal purposes.

Amazingly, the ape’s conceit, while certainly strange (and, let’s add, beautifully rendered), with human characteristics that give us a whole range of emotions, while also looks a lot like Robbie Williams), is not the craziest thing in Better man. That honor would go to the pic’s musical numbers, as Gracey (whose previous feature was the 2017 hit) The greatest showman) stages of such berserk ferocity that when they are over we may find it hard to believe what we have just witnessed. His camera swirls and rises above and crashes below his actors, weaving into and through scenes, even as the scenes themselves rapidly shift location and context. The performers strut and jump and pirouette and jump in and out of costumes. Pogo sticks and gumballs and flares and fireworks and scooters and double-decker buses and cemeteries and country roads become putty in the director’s hands. Street lights turn into the raging red fire of hell. The fields of Knebworth are transformed into a medieval butchery, covered in blood and smoke. The movie isn’t just “crazy” – it is crazy. If you try to describe it, you sound like a madman.

The unpredictable, improvisational power of these musical numbers is an artful illusion. They have clearly been choreographed and planned to be within an inch of their lives, as evidenced by the precision of the cutting, by the way the dance moves echo distant gestures in other scenes. In what is perhaps the film’s most moving section, Robbie meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), lead singer of the all-time big band All Saints, one New Year’s Eve at a masked party on a boat. Gracey intertwines their subsequent duet with future episodes from their doomed whirlwind romance (which in real life would last barely a year)—their hard partying, their engagement, and the abortion Nicole is forced into by her record company so she can continue to front a popular girl group. An elegant dip in their solitary dance becomes a flashback to a quick, huddled drink at a crowded party. A few jumps into a spinning embrace becomes one lover running after another inside a dark memory. And yet, here they are, still in the midst of their heady first meeting. It feels like a classic musical romance; you’d never guess that Robbie Williams went on to have many high-profile lovers, or that he’s been happily married for the past 14 years to someone else.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with slapstick dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is so constantly turned up by complete crap. musical sequences. Can the collision be intentional? Strangely enough, familiarity with the biographical beats eases us into the formal daring. If its structure and script were as unhinged as its style, the film could have been unwatchable. In their own way, these various elements serve to subvert the musical biopic genre: one by replicating its tropes to a satirical degree, the other by sending it all to another dimension.

At this point, some readers may be wondering: Who the hell is Robbie Williams? At the aforementioned Toronto screening, the singer himself acknowledged this dilemma with his usual mix of self-deprecation and cheeky grandiosity, noting that he has almost no North American following and giving a playful shout-out to “My American fan down there,” in the Toronto crowd . He then assured us that “everywhere else, I’m kind of a big deal.” He is real; the guy has broken several UK industry records

I’ll admit that back during Williams’ 1990s and early 2000s heyday, I read the UK pop press regularly and found him entertaining mostly as the Gallagher brothers’ favorite punching bag. (Liam would eventually marry Nicole Appleton.) I knew he was huge, but the few songs I heard I quickly forgot. Yet the man was omnipresent, constantly in the limelight, always saying or doing something stupid, as if desperate for more attention despite already achieving superstardom. This made him, as he himself would admit, quite annoying. (“A narcissistic, pugnacious, shit-eating bitch” is how he presents himself in the film. It’s also how he quits at the end.) But look Better manI thought back to why William’s antics made so many of us uncomfortable. Through the sheer audacity of its filmmaking, this film articulates it better than we ever could. It’s the parasitic paradox of fame and this feedback loop of admiration: If they ever stop screaming at you, they’ll start seeing right through you.