Me & My Monkey: Robbie Williams apes himself in new biopic, Better Man, to great effect

‘Fame makes monkeys of us all’ serves as both the tagline of the film Better Man, and also the conceit behind its most significant choice. Even if one had no knowledge of Robbie Williams or never saw the film, it was hard to argue that having the man himself represented by a Caesar-esque CGI ape was one so utterly bizarre that it could only be applauded. Even if it had been a totally disastrous move, you couldn’t blame the filmmakers for lack of trying something. It was a choice I sympathised with right from the beginning.

I should confess something right from the off here about my relationship to the subject: when I was seven years old, I played Robbie Williams in my Second Class Christmas play. I was not cast in this role, I requested it, which I’m sure proved difficult for my teacher, Ms. Gibbons (no irony intended in relation to the film’s content), to accommodate. After all, this was a fairly standard Christmas play: a thin narrative of Santa-adjacent hijinks with some Christmas songs in between. However, seeing a nervous, attention-shy child requesting to emulate their favourite popstar clearly struck a sympathetic chord with her, and she decided to oblige me. In the middle of the play, our narrator paused matters and declared: “What’s that? I think I hear Robbie Williams about!” Then out I strutted, with the same performative confidence as young ‘Robert’ shows in the early stages of Better Man as he plays a lead role in his own school play Pirates of Penzance, to perform a part-mime part-interpretive-dance to the song ‘These Dreams’ from Williams’ acclaimed second album, I’ve Been Expecting You. It was catastrophically ill-advised and goofy; the dance was made up as I went along, and the song was a slow, deep-cut album track to which the crowd couldn’t even sing along.

After three showings for our entire school and our parents, I hung up the role of Robbie Williams forever. While most embarrassing school play performances are thankfully consigned to faint memories to be trotted out in best man speeches or group chat pile-ons, I have no such luck. Video evidence of this performance still exists, and not the shaky home-video camera footage with terrible audio that was standard for the early 2000s. The father of a girl in our class was a professional videographer, and he recorded our final performance with high-tech (for the time) cameras and professional lighting. He produced a fully edited videotape, and sold copies to every child in our class. This of course means that there are twenty-nine copies of my performance out in the world, and one day, I may have to hunt them all down and destroy them like George Lucas with The Star Wars Holiday Special.

All of this is to say, I have a strange relationship to the artist Robbie Williams, whose music defined much of my taste in my young childhood, but who is also tied to my most embarrassing memory. His headline show at Slane in 1999 was recorded on a videotape that I wore out from regular rewatches. He was my introduction to Frank Sinatra, Queen, George Michael, Kylie Minogue, boybands, Britpop, body horror (the ‘Rock DJ’ video) and the type of messy, carefree, unrehearsed and unchoreographed dancing that I demonstrated in my cringeworthy tribute to him. After following him religiously from 1999 to 2005, his 2006 dance album Rudebox proved to be the point where I lost interest, and the next eighteen years were mainly vague check-ins at moments of cultural relevance (the X Factor comeback, the videos of him singing at his wife as she’s in labour, the UFOs phase, the Take That reunion, arguing with Jimmy Page about swimming pools). Every time his name was mentioned during my teenage years, it would inevitably be linked back to my performance in that school play, and a feeling would arise in my stomach that I can only liken to what the Guy Who Slipped on the Ice on RTÉ News must feel every time that clip is shared.

So, what was my reaction to the announcement of the movie Better Man, a Robbie Williams biopic helmed by The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey? Well, primarily, that it was an absolutely terrible title. (You’re going to make a biopic of the guy and name it after a song title that most people will associate with Pearl Jam? When ‘Let Me Entertain You’ is right there?) But, after I got over that, I spent the summer of 2024 revisiting his first six albums, watching his live shows at Slane and Knebworth, as well as a host of early interview clips. What I (re)discovered is that Williams is incredibly enigmatic and, for an artist as ubiquitous as he was at the turn of the century, incredibly self-deprecating. This lack of confidence belied a fairly awe-inspiring stage presence, with his persona akin to a laddish combination of Freddie Mercury and Dean Martin. And the songs? ‘Millenium’? ‘Old Before I Die’? ‘Strong’? ‘Kids’? ‘Monsoon’? A true collection of bangers.

It’s the strength of Williams’ music that forms the engine of Better Man. The story follows Robert Williams (played as a child by Carter J. Murphy and as an adult by Jonno Davies) from his youth living in the Northern England town of Stoke-on-Trent as a misfit but talented child living with his mother (Kate Mulvany), his beloved Nan (Alison Steadman), and his fame-aspirant father, Peter (a really excellent Steve Pemberton). Peter’s love of Rat-pack singers like Sinatra and Martin bleeds down to his son, who is imbued with an unquenchable desire to perform, which he begins at school at the expense of his grades. Williams himself, who narrates the film, notes that the key to his success hasn’t been ‘being the best’, but rather carrying off both wins and losses with the same cheeky-chappie charm. It’s this charm that wins over Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) in Williams’ audition for Take That at the age of just fifteen. A raucous five-year stint with Britain’s favourite boyband is punctuated by Williams being renamed from Robert to ‘Robbie’ and indulging heavily in drugs and alcohol, to the point of his eventual expulsion from the group, and the beginning of his successful solo career. In addition to his substance abuse, Williams is haunted throughout by spectres of himself threatening to kill him, a manifestation of the crippling self-loathing that lay just under the surface for much of his career. Williams facing up to these demons and overcoming them, as well as repairing his relationship with his absent father, becomes the film’s core thesis.

As excited as I was after reacquainting myself with the source material, placing one’s faith in the artistic quality of a music biopic is ill-considered in 2024. In recent years, we’ve had biopics of Tupac, Queen, Motley Crue, Elton John, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Elvis, Whitney Houston, Bob Marley and Amy Winehouse. Exactly sixty-per-cent of one of those movies is good. The rest range from poor to some of the worst films of the decade, and each film had the distinct advantage of its subject(s) being markedly more famous worldwide than Robbie Williams, whose persistent lack of cultural relevance in America, the largest and most important cinema market, cast doubt on whether the film could achieve any real level of success. While this film is far from a conventional biopic given its CGI lead, Gracey was likely cognisant of this fact and aware that the plot would need to be a recognisable rags-to-riches story construction to make sense to a broad audience.

For this reason, much of the film’s plot is similarly structured to other music biopics. We see our lead character as an outcast child, a close relationship to a family member that will define them, ‘the audition’, the euphoric early success, the love story, the domestic and professional quarrels, the substance abuse, rock bottom, and the comeback. The common musical biopic device of using several of the artist’s key songs as allusions to what’s occurring in their lives is employed also, and they also serve as time-accelerators to move the story along. ‘Rock DJ’ soundtracks an incredible sequence that charts Take That’s rise to fame, culminating in a highly enjoyable dance number in London’s Regent Street, while ‘She’s the One’ is used to chart the romance between Williams and Nicole Appleton. Gracey is no stranger to staging a fun and frenetic musical set-piece, and his flair and style make Better Man visually engaging throughout. The ape’s VFX is quite remarkable, worthy of at least as much praise as was afforded to the modern Planet of the Apes trilogy, and its consistent high-quality is what helps us accept the bizarre reality that Gracey creates for us.

Gracey and his co-writers, Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole, don’t stray too much from the biopic formula, but the decisions they make so that those familiar with Robbie Williams aren’t bored and those unfamiliar get the general gist demonstrates smart writing, and an understanding of what bogs these movies down. An early decision that impressed me was electing to make this a 15A rating with almost wholly unsanitised language, reflective of Williams as a person who since the outset of his fame has been letting f-bombs slip at inopportune moments. They also wisely avoid the easy trope of the ‘villain’ character. Herriman effectively renders Martin-Smith as the conniving, greedy star-maker, Gary Barlow is depicted as being firm in his desire for creative control of Take That, and even Liam Gallagher takes a few licks for, well, being himself. Ultimately, though, the villain of the piece is the hero. Williams is depicted as a bundle of contradictions, by turns a bundle of unbridled energy and talent who lights up a room, and also a self-hating, self-destructive malcontent at war with his own fame. Every time he tries for sincerity, he is rebuffed by the world around him, and thus he retreats into his cheeky-chappie popstar mode and ever more drug binges. Given the years of mocking I received from witnesses to my own sincere popstar performance, you could say that this struck a chord with me.

The depiction of Williams as an ape obviously gives Gracey the freedom to use CGI creatively throughout, but far from the glitzy circus tents of The Greatest Showman, he makes most effective use of this technology in depicting Williams’ increasing mental health difficulties. The CGI apes haunting the crowd of every live show, threatening him with ever more violence, are quite startling, and effective in their demonstration of how difficult it was for him to get through the simple act of singing a song without chemical alteration. One particular sequence occurs during the legendary Knebworth concert in 2003 where Williams’ ape dives into a crowd of alternate ape versions of himself for a massive and brutal knife fight. The imagery is incredibly stark and arresting for such a conventional film; it may strike some as achingly literal, but given the track record for milquetoast, self-serving drivel in biopics where the subject works this closely with the creator, this strikingly honest look into how Williams views himself breaks many of the conventions that have been perpetuated in musical biopic filmmaking.

It’s not without its faults. It seems like Williams is having one too many breakdowns of relationships in the final act, and the decision to end with a fictionalised reimagining of his 2001 Royal Albert Hall performance of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ to include his father, while a lovely conclusion to the film, is a touch saccharine given all that we learn about the origins of their relationship difficulties. However, these faults of conventionalism are easy to forgive when the film is consistently impressing you with choices that you will never have seen before in any film, much less a musical. Assuming that people get out to see it, this is likely to be a crowd-pleaser. Williams fans and even casual listeners will enjoy a peak behind the curtain at the man himself, particularly highlighting how many of his biggest hit songs relate to his mental health struggles, while musical and film fans will be impressed by this rapid levelling-up of Gracey’s filmmaking abilities after The Greatest Showman.

On a personal level, it’s a curious experience to see your childhood hero, who would later become your teenage object-of-derision, depicted in such a way on screen. Williams isn’t Elvis, or Tupac, or even Amy Winehouse. He’s not a subject of cultural obsession or folklore, just a popstar who was really big at one point, had some unfortunate mental health and substance issues, then subsequently came back and has never really recaptured the same level of fame, a trajectory that he shares with innumerable other famous artists. My own relationship to him is a fairly common journey that we experience with our adolescent idols. The aversion I developed towards Williams and his music as a result of that Christmas play is perhaps a little stronger than the normal abandonment of ‘objects of childhood’ that we collectively experience, but the second a young Robert starts singing the words of his mega-hit ‘Feel’, the first song of the film, I found myself getting emotional thinking back to how important that song and this artist were to me. I could remember the excitement of getting his new albums as gifts, watching a live performance on the BBC, going on long drives so I could make my parents listening to his CDs and, somehow, I could even remember the excitement of the day I found out that I would get to play him in my Christmas play. I can think of no greater compliment to this excellent film than that.

And what about seven-year-old me who decided to dramatically toss his denim jacket to the wings and perform an uncomfortably long four-minute mime to one of his favourite singer’s least popular songs, what would he think of Better Man? I suppose he would feel validated that, as he nears thirty, both he and the world at large are beginning to realise just how great of a performer Robbie Williams always was, and still is, despite all of his flaws. And maybe he would consider buying a ticket to Williams’ Croke Park show next Autumn in the hope that he can hear all of the old hits that he danced to so many times in his bedroom. And maybe he’ll understand that there was some method in the madness of the decision to play a grand, Robbie-esque part in that school play and, should video evidence of the performance ever surface, he’ll smile, dust off the denim jacket and, like his old hero says so often in Better Man, “Light ’em up.”