What makes Better Man a distinctive music biopic among the seemingly endless sea of the subgenre is not the fact that director Michael Gracey decided to portray Robbie Williams as a CGI monkey; rather, it's how Gracey prioritizes the emotion of events over accuracy. The latter has often been a point of contention with fan bases, filling up subreddits with treatises bemoaning incorrect chronology, songs performed at the wrong concerts and a too-dark shade of blue used on a stage costume.
Better Man follows the life and career of British singer and Take That member Robbie Williams beginning with a quick visit to his childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, navigating the familial pains his father created when leaving the family to pursue a career as a singer. Where the early childhood scenes establish the heart of the film, his teenage years and subsequent Take That era set the vibe.
Utilizing the same pomp and circumstance that made The Greatest Showman a success, Gracey puts together a glorious montage of Take That's rocket to stardom, replete with an array of '90s hairstyles, flashy costume changes and synchronized choreographed dance along London's Regent Street. While Take That found massive success at home, outside of the UK the group is less known. In under four minutes — and delightfully set to Williams's "Rock DJ" — Gracey (and his editing team) expertly relays the chaos that surrounded the group and the spectacular highs they achieved, arming us with information without detailing every aspect of their ascent.
Gracey replicates this across the film to effectively replace exposition and instead grant audiences the necessary feeling to understand a time in Williams's life or a relationship. The most stunning example of this comes from Williams's two-year romance with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton. The two singers met while filming an episode of Top of the Pops in the late '90s, with their relationship ending in a broken engagement, Appleton being forced to abort their child by her group's management, and Williams's infidelity and seething jealousy over Appleton's success.
Given their relationship ended over 20 years ago, the space given to their love is simultaneously heartwarming and -wrenching. Rather than meeting on Top of the Pops, in the film, Williams and Appleton's relationship begins on New Year's Day atop a yacht with gold details and fireworks filling the sky. With Williams's cover of World Party's "She's the One" providing the soundtrack, we run through a montage of key moments in their relationship interwoven with an incredible dance sequence on the yacht. While their relationship ended in tragedy, how Williams chooses to remember their relationship after all these years is truly touching, and perfectly demonstrative of the magic of Better Man.
The film has been described as "the Robbie Williams monkey movie," and while it's an apt description, it's certainly reductive of what the CGI monkey adds to the film. Jonno Davies's motion-capture performance as Robbie from teenage to adulthood recalls the success of Andy Serkis's many mo-cap turns. Coupling Davies's skills with Wētā FX's involvement in the film, Williams-as-a-monkey becomes less schtick and more effective narrative device.
In contrast to other lead biopic performances, Gracey doesn't give the audience a chance to compare the appearance of Davies and Williams, or force Davies to don prosthetics to make him look more Williams-esque. By making the leap of faith so extreme, we simply give in to Williams as a monkey and truly forget that a member of Take That is a chimp.
The montages and CGI underlie Gracey's intention with Better Man, which is to share the humility and insecurities of a rock star on top of the world, and celebrate the rare success story of an entertainer who becomes entangled in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll and lives to tell about it. Ironically, Better Man bypasses the usual pitfalls that plague a biopic by leaning into them. By taking the non-traditional approach to a biopic and relying on vibes over note-perfect accuracy, Gracey finds the true humanity of Williams.
The film captivates and charms; it left me a blubbering mess; and, most importantly, it raises the bar for other biopics. Better Man engages audiences with the spirit of an artist's story, warts and all, and demands of us to let go of the idea of a perfect retelling — don't get stuck in the weeds, but see the forest for the trees.