Musical biopic puts a marvelous simian spin on Robbie Williams’ pop-stardom monkeyshines
Better Man
Starring Robbie Williams/Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton & Rachel Banno
Directed by Michael Gracey
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Jan. 10
I’ll venture that you’ve never seen anything like this swinging, soaring, stirring music biopic about British pop star Robbie Williams. Because the star of the show is a monkey.
Throughout the film, Williams is portrayed as a chimpanzee, meant to represent the singer as he sees himself, “unevolved” and immature. “I’m ugly, stupid and untalented,” is young Robbie’s stinging self-assessment. Though what we hear is Williams’ own singing and speaking voice, British actor Jonno Davies portrays him—via some amazingly tactile high-tech motion-capture technology—as the monkey. It’s like one of the primates from Planet of the Apes became a Brit-pop singing star.
When he’s 16, Williams joins the startup “boy band” Take That—in the vein of Boys II Men or Backstreet Boys—that would notch nearly 30 Top 40 hits, a dozen of which went to No. 1 on the British charts. The movie is filled with music, often as springboards for movie-musical sequences, like when the group hits the streets for an poppin’ and boppin’ take of the song “Rock DJ.”
It’s a bold choice to portray your movie’s star as a simian, surrounded by ordinary people who don’t seem to notice anything unusual. But it allows for some wildly provocative, surprisingly evocative moments as director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) depicts just how maladjusted Williams feels, from growing up in working-class London to reaching the top of the pops as self-loathing singing star. The visual landscape is constantly moving and fluid, from “reality” to sweeping sequences of fantasy. When Williams crashes his car into a frozen lake, he’s swarmed by fans and paparazzi, pulling him deeper under. After he meets a cute girl at a party, the entire scene becomes a dazzling dance number orchestrated to the 1999 hit “She’s the One.” (And hey, this monkey’s got some smoooooth Fred Astaire moves!) When Williams is singing on stage and peers out into the audience, he sees troubling versions of himself, apes glaring back at him in scorn and disapproval. At one point, he dives into the crowd and fights them.
British actor Steve Pemberton plays Williams’ dad, an unabashed fan of classic crooners who abandoned his family to chase his own dreams of stardom. Rachel Banno is Nicole Appleton, the British pop star for whom Williams falls, hard, but eventually loses to another singing star, Liam Gallagher (Leo Harvey-Ellege) of Oasis. Alison Steadman (who played Mrs. Bennet in the mini-series Pride and Prejudice) is Robbie’s beloved grandmother, who gave him affection and support while munching on bags of crisps in front of the telly.
“I don’t want to be a nobody,” a sorrowful young Robbie tells his gram, recalling something hurtful and lingering that his father once told him. Robbie instead wants to be something that he would later express in his song “Better Man.”
That song, of course, becomes the title and the theme of this marvel of a movie, in which a CGI-motion-capture ape man makes us feel all kinds of human empathy for the real person he represents in some daringly creative cinematic monkeyshines.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 