I’ve talked a lot about how the music biopic has sort of been one of the most boring subgenres we have today in film. Unless one is doing something so daring and so different, there’s bound to be a sameness to each one we get. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But when I heard that Michael Gracey, director of The Greatest Showman, a film I have complicated feelings about would be making a biopic of British pop sensation Robbie Williams (well known basically everywhere except the United States), but the gimmick was he would be playing himself, voicing a CGI chimpanzee, I was intrigued. Not in a ‘that sounds interesting’ way, but in an ‘I love a mess’ way. I left the theater pretty shocked by how all of this turned out.

Better Man follows the life story of British pop icon Robbie Williams, and as stated before, he is played by a CGI chimpanzee and everyone else in the film is a human. The film follows his life from childhood to where he is today, starting with his sweet relationship with his grandmother, and the father whose approval he was desperate for. As a teenager, he’s picked to be in the boy band Take That, but then some bad blood emerges between the members. We see his relationship with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), and how that evolves and falls apart. And finally we see him reach his breaking point where he must embark on a journey of redemption.

Better Man follows the biopic structure in a fairly familiar way – we have the rise and fall and redemption arc – but it is also subverting it in ways I responded well to. First of all, the film is a full-on jukebox musical, turning his well-known songs into big, elaborate musical set pieces, not unlike Elton John’s biopic Rocketman, which I still maintain is the best of this current wave of music biopics. There is a musical sequence in this film involving hundreds of dancers, lots of really insane, elaborate choreography, and multiple locations, that is edited together to look like a single unbroken shot. And I could easily watch this single number another ten times right this very second. It was absolutely thrilling to behold on the big screen. It made my jaw drop, it made me gasp and want to cheer. But this is a scene that occurs fairly early into the film, and unfortunately we never match the energy and razzle-dazzle of that moment for the rest of the film. 

But that’s not to say the rest of the film is bad, because it definitely isn’t. There are some problems here. The pacing lags in the middle, and at other points it feels like we’re rushing through material at a breakneck speed. It also is a bit distancing when you know all of these actors are giving their performances opposite somebody in a CGI motion capture suit. However, no one really comments on it, it’s never addressed in any meaningful way. You hear Williams in voiceover comment on how he’s always felt ‘less evolved’ than other people, and apparently he once told an interviewer that he felt that fame made him feel like a ‘dancing monkey’ and that influenced this decision. The weird thing is, as the movie is going on, you kind of forget about this. It’s a gimmick that feels like a gimmick but it’s all worked together in a way that feels seamless in spite of itself.

But still, with everything working against this movie, it’s a bit of a shock that it turned out as well as it does. I walked into this knowing director Michael Gracey can direct the hell out of a musical number but unconvinced of his skills as a storyteller. To understand why, I must go on a quick tangent about his debut feature film, The Greatest Showman. Bear with me for a second.

The Greatest Showman enjoyed the kind of success that musical films aspire to but so rarely achieve. It made half a billion dollars globally, people kept going back for multiple in-theater viewings of it, the songs were radio hits. But as a story, it’s a mess. The film is written as a biopic of PT Barnum, a vastly problematic historical figure, and yet the character onscreen has almost nothing in common with the real man. It’s a film in search of a story, in search of characters, in search of anything that means anything. There is almost nothing going on plot wise in The Greatest Showman, there is no rising tension, the characters barely even characters. The film is a delivery device for these musical numbers that feel like B-sides from mid 2000’s pop albums. And yet, depending on who you ask, it is considered a beloved film. So I was excited for the razzle-dazzle of it all, but worried about how Gracey would handle a musical biopic. 

Better Man does a few crucial things right. Choosing the Rocketman approach of presenting Williams’ songs as these big, elaborate musical numbers, rather than background music, was a smart idea. Also choosing to have a big-budget studio biopic where the message you take away from it is ‘wow, Robbie Williams has always been kind of an asshole’ is an unexpected, yet inspired move. I think it’s due to having a subject who is not precious about looking back on their own life. Rocketman also did this, highlighting the ugly parts of the subject’s personality and not shying away from them or omitting them entirely. It makes the film feel more honest and more revealing, and that makes a difference.

So yes, Better Man is not without its problems – some pacing issues, some biopic tropes that feel familiar, but as a whole I cannot believe how well this thing works. It’s a bold, inventive, audacious, sometimes electrifying look at a musician I was not at all familiar with, and it left me wanting to learn more about him and also get the soundtrack. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what these movies are for? As long as you add at least one (1) of these songs to your streaming music library of choice, the suits at Paramount are happy. Do I think this movie will be the thing that finally makes Robbie Williams a star stateside? Probably not, but still, you could do a lot worse at the movies in the month of January than what you get with Better Man.