Better Man (2024)
Directed by: Michael Gracey
Premise: A biopic of pop musician Robbie Williams, dramatizing Williams’ childhood, his tenure with boyband Take That, and his career as a solo artist. The filmmakers imagine Williams as an ape.
What Works: Better Man comes from filmmaker Michael Gracey who previously directed The Greatest Showman. Gracey has an elaborate and high energy filmmaking style and Better Man benefits from that approach. It’s a technical marvel of musical filmmaking and Gracey and his crew have made the material cinematic. The musical set pieces are kinetic and aside from being remarkable pieces of entertainment, the sequences also embed character development and exposition into the musical action. Robbie Williams is presented in the film as an ape created using motion capture technology. The illusion is convincing and the ape plays like just another human character in the movie. Like a lot of these musical biopics, Better Man was made with the cooperation of its subject but the filmmakers don’t shy away from the rough edges of Robbie Williams’ life. In fact, they embrace Williams’ mistakes and rock and roll excesses (which itself is part of the attraction of this genre) and Williams provides narration that adds some personality to the movie. The filmmakers understand that Williams is an entertainer and they embrace his sense of showmanship, creating a musical spectacle out of his life.
What Doesn’t: The style and production value of Better Man are a glossy packaging of familiar content. As dramatized in this film, Robbie Williams’ life and career followed the predictable rage-to-riches-to-rehab pattern that we’ve seen in so many show business biopics. Williams’ charm and self-deprecating regard softens the familiarity but beneath the surface there is nothing here we haven’t seen in plenty of similar movies. There is an emphasis on Williams’ complicated relationship with his father (Steve Pemberton) but the supporting characters are mostly flat and incidental. When celebrity biopics are produced by their subject, the films tend to become monuments to self-absorption and that is the case here. The vanity is particularly egregious in Better Man because Williams’ life and career are not that interesting. The gloss of the filmmaking comes across a bit desperate to make up for the pedestrian nature of the story and the unremarkability of Williams’ music. He was certainly a talented entertainer but Williams’ music was average pop song filler. Representing Williams as an ape does give Better Man some novelty and it helps to visually distinguish Williams’ character in the very busy musical scenes but there’s no meaningful reason to depict Williams this way. It’s just a gimmick.
Bottom Line: As a matter of cinematic craftsmanship, Better Man is superior musical filmmaking. As a showbusiness biopic, Robbie Williams’ life has few surprises and Better Man is ultimately superficial but that surface is exquisitely fashioned.
Episode: #1032 (January 19, 2025)