By Michael Andor Brodeur, The Washington Post
The last time this reviewer was the target market for Robbie Williams, it didn’t go so well.
In December of 1997, the British pop singer and former boy band sensation released his breakthrough hit “Angels,” or so I’m told. Like much of my generational cohort in the States, I hadn’t the foggiest idea who Williams was.
Though his lean croon and good looks had earned him incandescent fame overseas; and though he was redefining himself after years of pelvis-pumping partial stardom as one-fifth of Take That; and though his solo star was only just beginning to rise with “Angels,” launching what would become one of the most storied careers in British music, my floor of the dorm was too busy bumping Wu-Tang Clan and the Foo Fighters to care. Robbie who?
“Better Man,” a delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey, chronicles the singer’s tumultuous rise, celebrates his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits, and gives the project of ensconcing Williams in the hearts and minds of the global masses another go. American audiences might be shocked at how well it works on all fronts. Especially considering that Williams is rendered throughout as a CGI chimpanzee.
That might feel like burying the lead – the chimp thing. At first glance, it feels very important that Williams – who narrates his tale – is visually present only as a monkey. But it takes only a few moments of trailing Williams through the trials of his boyhood in 1980s Stoke-on-Trent – where he’s taunted by bullies, doted over by his fading Nan (Alison Steadman) and abandoned by his spotlight-hungry dad (Steve Pemberton) – for one’s disbelief to hang itself on a hook, and for this simian form to fit the bill with uncanny precision.
Voiced and portrayed through motion capture by Jonno Davies, this monkey manifestation of Williams (developed by the New Zealand-based Weta FX) is astonishingly expressive and strangely disarming. Davies feels at all times present just under the fur, and Williams feels just as present in Davies’s portrayal. Several times, Gracey has us gaze directly into eyes that sure feel like human eyes. By the end of the film, I wondered if I would have given a hoot about Williams if he *weren’t* a monkey.
Then again, it’s more than momentarily unsettling to watch a monkey drilling sloppily carded lines of coke, splayed on a bed surrounded by groupies, dancing and romancing his very human future fiancée Nicole Appleton of All Saints (Raechelle Banno), or (later) shooting up in their locked bathroom.
If the monkey bit, which is neither explicitly addressed by Williams nor perceived by anybody around him, is to be understood as how Williams sees himself – both as a singing, dancing source of mindless entertainment and as a man who has struggled to “evolve,” as he briefly hints – the roiling, raucous flow of the film itself can be understood as how Williams remembers himself. Gracey, who directed 2017’s “The Greatest Showman,” lends nearly every transition the seamless sweep and molten logic of a dream.
For those well versed in Williams’s work, “Better Man” retrofits pieces of his oeuvre into a surprisingly coherent narrative. His 2002 hit “Feel” becomes an anthem of his childhood alienation. The 2000 stomper “Rock DJ” fuels one of the most eye-popping dance sequences I’ve seen in years. His ouster from Take That and his drowning in dejection is beautifully set to “Come Undone,” another track from 2002’s “Escapology.”
And when Williams finally in 2003 makes it to the stage of Knebworth, where 375,000 fans converged for “the biggest music event in British history” (as we are repeatedly reminded), he dips back in his catalogue to 1997’s “Let Me Entertain You” – as close to a mission statement as one could hope for from Williams, here inspiring a gory battle scene between the singer and his own insecurities: i.e., the proverbial monkeys on his back.
“You can’t manufacture a miracle,” as Williams sings in “Something Beautiful” – the song that launched his long collaboration with producer Guy Chambers (Tom Budge). But there’s nothing miraculous about Williams’s career – if anything, “Better Man” reveals the singer’s sometimes frightening singularity of purpose, the unbroken vector of his ambition, the wide-screen scale of his ego.
If any miracles are performed here, they belong to Gracey, who in one swoop has managed to reinvent the biopic, up the ante on the ongoing revival of movie musicals and raise the legacy of Robbie Williams to a level that feels fully earned – especially if you ask Robbie Williams.
RATING: 3.5 stars out of 4