Better Man: Chimpanzee Robbie Williams brings excitement to an otherwise conventional biopic

The tension between bravado and vulnerability, present on some level in so many pop superstars, has always been especially apparent in Robbie Williams. Understanding that the two go together, he has routinely spiked his cocksure image with arresting displays of insecurity. The pain is right there in his lyrics – “You think that I’m strong / You’re wrong / You’re wrong” – and has been elaborated on in a few unusually candid behind-the-scenes portraits, including Chris Heath’s remarkable book of reportage Feel (2004) and Netflix’s docuseries Robbie Williams (2023), which describe his struggles with the fallout from fame.

How then to tell the story of a man who has already bared his soul many times over – and to do it through the ossifying genre of the musical biopic? Like Piece by Piece (2024), the recent animated documentary that tells Pharrell’s life story with a Lego aesthetic, Better Man innovates through visual presentation. Here, the twist is that Robbie is depicted as a walking, talking, singing chimpanzee, rendered in CGI (courtesy of Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX; the motion-captured performance is given by Jonno Davies, who also voices the singer in many scenes). 

This blunt and bizarre device is deployed matter-of-factly, with no comment, so that we get used to it fast. Monkey Robbie swaggers and stumbles through a narrative that otherwise resembles countless biopics – including director Michael Gracey’s P.T. Barnum musical The Greatest Showman (2017). Scenes of his working-class upbringing in Stoke-on-Trent are sketched out, mostly to provide nuggets of psychological motivation for his later behaviour. Steve Pemberton plays the flighty father who sparks his son’s love of showbiz but is fickle with his affections, while Alison Steadman is the nurturing grandmother. (Her death will cue the film’s ultimate needle-drop: ‘Angels’.)

Robbie’s recruitment into Take That leads to a dizzying rush of initial success, but he suffers wounding jibes from frontman Gary Barlow and manipulative manager Nigel Martin-Smith. The high-octane strangeness of fame takes its toll on the singer, who is increasingly overcome with depression and anxiety as his debauched solo career takes off, culminating in his record-breaking Knebworth shows in 2003. In Heath’s Feel, which covers the run-up to Knebworth, Robbie is a muted figure, some years sober yet hooked on Championship Manager. 

Better Man leans throughout on the more cinematic shorthand of substance abuse to convey the sense of crisis. The portrayal of the singer is often unflattering and sometimes very funny: take the scene when he desperately sucks up to the self-serious Gallagher brothers in a pub. Musical interludes featuring Robbie’s hits are sprinkled anachronistically across this timeline, the songs chosen to match the mood of the moment. The euphoria of the early Take That years is marked with an exuberant rendering of ‘Rock DJ’ staged as a one-shot dance number on Regent Street. Outside these scenes, Gracey’s direction is less confident: a stray freeze-frame here, some erratic handheld camerawork there. Robbie himself, who also executive-produces, provides an intermittent voiceover that never feels fully integrated into the story.

But the chimp idea works. This is, after all, a man whose image is rooted in cheekiness. More to the point, the device, apparently inspired by Robbie’s description of himself as a “performing monkey”, is a novel way of capturing the feeling of alienation that seems to have dogged him over the years. The singer is never quite there, even in the rare scenes of apparent happiness – and especially during Knebworth, an outward triumph that, as the film tells it, brings out the worst of his self-loathing. At this point, in a dreamlike sequence, the crowd becomes populated with chimps who Robbie engages in a brutal video-game-style battle; the artificial VFX only heighten the eerie sense of dissociation. Trapped in his persona, he is doubly isolated: as has been noted elsewhere, if other characters never remark on the fact that he’s a monkey, it ’s because they don’t understand how he feels.

Robbie Williams, the self-styled entertainer who developed a fear of performing, is in this sense a rather different figure from Barnum (or Pink, the subject of Gracey’s tour documentary Pink: All I Know So Far, 2021). Gloom hangs over the film’s desaturated world. Robbie finds some redemption at the end, but this act is rushed and not wholly convincing. He is still a chimp in these scenes, alienated to the last.

► Better Man is in UK cinemas on 26 December.