Better Man (2024 | UK | 135 minutes | Michael Gracey)

Whenever the British popstar Robbie Williams’s name pops into my head, I think of an anecdote I’ve heard a few times on various podcasts from the Welsh journalist Jon Ronson, who told of a story where Williams asked Ronson to facilitate spending a night in a haunted house, and after Ronson set all of that up, Williams decided he’d rather go to a UFO convention, prompting Ronson to say, “No wonder Robbie Williams and ghosts get on so well, they both only manifest when it suits them.”

Of course that story ran through my head several times a day in the month prior to seeing the new Williams biopic Better Man, the new movie from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, and where Williams is portrayed as a monkey. As Williams’s story was already told in a poorly-received Netflix documentary in 2023, my expectations for Better Man were minimal. It turns out, it’s actually pretty great.

The gimmick comes from Williams saying he often feels like a performance monkey, and he says at the beginning that that is how he sees himself. I think the gimmick works because it’s played straight and not as a novelty, but also because it takes the popstar’s handsomeness out of the equation and brings a vulnerability that a Williams lookalike couldn’t provide. We’ve seen a handful of okay-to-pretty-good biopics of English popstars (Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman), but I found Better Man, umm ,better because Monkey Robbie Williams lets us know the man without letting himself off the hook for his often awful behavior. Moreover, I find pathos much more palatable when it comes from a monkey.

Robbie Williams is one of the biggest musical icons in the UK and known mostly in the US for not being able to export his success over here. I remember hearing him say that he just didn’t work hard enough, or want to work hard enough, to have the US success that’s eluded him. (By contrast, Ed Sheeran, whose catalogue of songs is much thinner and more shallow than Williams, very, very much was willing to put in the effort.)

Better Man, a title of a Robbie Williams song, charts his life from infancy to his rocky relationship with his small-time entertainer father to his time in the boyband Take That through his wildly successful solo career and undoing from booze and drugs. It very much has a “he was flying high until it all came crashing down” plot that’s so ubiquitous in rock star biopics, so even people 100% unfamiliar with who Robbie Williams is will be able to follow along. Cliche, yes, but effective, I think, because despite being a moody, popstar diva with substance abuse issues who tends to burn every bridge he crosses, Robbie Williams is also extremely charming and self-effacing.

Still, musicals live and die by music and that is where Better Man succeeds. Most musicals are lucky if they have one or two show-stopping scenes. Better Man has at least five: an early performance from Take That where they cover “Land of 1,000 Dances,” a performance of “Rock DJ” with Take That on the streets of London, a Take That performance where Ape Robbie tries to take over lead singing duties, his performance at the 2003 Knebworth Festival that turned into a “Planet of the Apes” Civil War (you just have to see it), and a finale that made tear up.

Director Michael Gracey”s last film was a P.T Barnum biopic staring Hugh Jassckman, so he clearly knows how to create a musical spectacle. Barnum was, of course, famous for giving people what they wanted in terms of circus performances. Gracey knows to give the people what they want: an epic musical about a famous artist. Who knew they also wanted it done in the form of a triple-threat monkey?

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Better Man opens in Seattle-area theaters on Friday, January 10.