| Worth seeing: | as a boldly creative, refreshingly original biopic about a star whose cheekiness was as important to his success as his undoubted talent |
| Director: | Michael Gracey |
| Featuring: | Jonno Davies, Robbie Williams, Alison Steadman, Anthony Hayes, Chase Vollenweider, Chris Gun, Damon Herriman, Frazer Hadfield, Jake Simmance, Jesse Hyde, John Waters, Kate Mulvany, Leo Harvey-Elledge, Liam Head, Raechelle Banno, Steve Pem |
| Length: | 135 minutes |
| Certificate: | |
| Country: | Australia, China, France, UK, US |
| Released: | 26th December 2024 |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Twelve year old Robert Williams is a scrawny little fellow, who gets bullied by the bigger boys. He seeks solace, singing in the living room with his Dad, Peter (Steve Pemberton).
One day, Peter heads off to sing in London – and never comes back – desperate to make it as a singer but too proud to come back, when the best he can manage is tiny crowds at holiday camps.
This leaves Robert, his mother and grandmother (Alison Steadman) struggling to make ends meet in their tiny terraced house in Stoke.
When Robert sees an advert for a singer for a boy-band, he feels like his life is about to change.
Against expectations, he is selected as a member of Take That and they become an instant nightclub and chart success.
But Robbie – as the manager rebrands him – doesn’t quite fit in with their clean-cut image. His creativity stifled by the band’s main songwriter, Gary Barlow, Robbie feels more like a rock star – dabbling in drink and drugs and hanging out with Oasis.
Before long, Take That fire Robbie and he steps onto the stage as a solo artist – determined to beat the Oasis record of two nights at Knebworth.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Simply put, this is the origins story of the singer Robbie Williams and how he never really fitted in until he was allowed to stand out.
Director Michael Gracey’s creative masterstroke is to highlight Robbie feeling different from everyone around him by portraying him as a chimpanzee; Robbie, apparently, once described himself as a performing monkey and the notion appears to have stuck.
It takes only a scene or two before the audience feels completely comfortable with accepting Jonno Davies’ motion-capture monkey as the eponymous singer, trying to carve out a career, being squeezed by clean-cut popsters on the one side and gritty rockers on the other.
A brief relationship with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton comes close to grounding him, but with his competitive nature and ballooning ambition, it comes at the wrong time of his life and his emotional immaturity becomes one of his few regrets – a key moment in this relationship, which pushed love into the background, highlights one of the most brutal aspects of the entertainment industry.
From the producers of the Sir Elton John biopic Rocketman, Better Man employs many of the same techniques – not least the use of music but plucking the right song for the moment, rather than sticking rigorously to the chronology; one of the big set-piece moments features Take That dancing to one of Robbie’s biggest solo hits, Rock DJ, up and down Regent Street.
While following many of the predictable traits of the zero-to-hero life-story – working class background, bullied by his peers, absent parent and so on – Better Man displays originality, bold narrative flourishes and genuine heart-warming and bitter-sweet moments to create a genuinely refreshing and impressive piece of film-making. Narration from the singer himself adds to the authenticity of the storytelling.
Robbie felt like a flawed, but sincere and genuine star-in-the-making and the audience willingly go on this difficult journey with him. We feel his frustration, disgust and passion for the music industry.
When he makes missteps – such as in his relationship with Nicole or his best friend – as viewers, we feel the disappointment of a parent, who desperately wants things to work out but realise their children are responsible for their own mistakes.
The effects were remarkable – eliciting as much emotion from the face of a chimp as they would from a human.
It’s notable to see how his cheekiness was as important to his rise as his undoubted talent – as well as being a driving factor on some of those occasions that things didn’t go to plan. He literally becomes a cheeky monkey.
Perhaps what was lacking was a true understanding of his self-destructive urge – and how he finally managed to overcome it – how he finally became the eponymous Better Man.
One of the hardest things about any biopic is to decide which part of a life to portray and while this appears to be set up to follow Robbie’s dream of playing to record crowds at Knebworth, it’s a moment featuring two dreamers on stage that proves to be the perfect emotional moment on which to leave this established superstar to set off on the next leg of his journey without us.