‘Better Man’ Review – The Ego Has Landed [TIFF 2024]

0Let’s get the monkey business out of the way.

Yes, in Better Man, Robbie Williams is a CGI monkey. He is not a monkey for just one opening scene meant to shock and awe. He is a teenage monkey, a boy bander monkey, a British pop god monkey, a drug-and-drink addicted monkey, and an elder statesman monkey singing Frank Sinatra on stage with his father. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what Better Man wants to achieve with such an ostensibly wild and absurd conceit.

The jukebox musical, directed by The Greatest Showman’s Michael Gracey, follows the life and career of Robbie Williams, one of the biggest pop stars of the last quarter century. That may sound preposterous if your knowledge of pop music is limited to North America, but Williams is massive everywhere else, having sold over 75 million records worldwide. As such, Better Man is an introduction for large swaths of American audiences to a titan of blistering irreverence and introspection. It closely follows Williams on his journey for fame and attention: his childhood talent show performances, his days as one-fifth of British boy band Take That, and finally as the globe-spanning rudebox whose success eclipsed everything and everyone. However, his dizzying heights are weighed down by crippling self-doubt, his fear that he’s nothing more than a dancing monkey, which leads him to a raucous dance floor spin with self-destruction. 

So, the CGI monkey is the physical manifestation of Robbie Williams’s impostor syndrome and natural-born charisma. It’s a clever visual metaphor that suits the irrepressible persona that Williams has cultivated over the last years (or, as the film suggests, since birth). Better Man is best when it follows that vein of tapping into Williams’s bottomless well of rambunctious energy and manifesting it on screen. While he is played by Jonno Davies (via motion-capture technology), Williams voices over the film, sharing his innermost thoughts, fears, and slags of his life. The running commentary is funny and profound, the purest expression of what sets Williams apart from his contemporaries. Williams’s narration of his own life is nearly enough to inspire audiences to add Sing When You’re Winning or Escapology to a Spotify or Apple Music playlist.

Coming in a razor-thin close second are Better Man’s musical numbers, which follow the Rocketman model of being fantastical set pieces rather than straightforward performances of Williams’s work. Gracey does well by Williams’s catalog of rollicking pop juggernauts and vulnerable ballads, mapping them against key moments in his life and reinvigorating them with fresh insight and context. “Rock DJ,” arguably Williams’s biggest hit, is reframed as a chaotic night on the town at the height of his Take That powers. It’s a dizzying, exhilarating number, with whip-tight choreography and camera work that combine brilliantly to form one of the year’s best scenes. His other biggest hit, the stunning ballad “Angels,” takes on more tender, heartbreaking significance as it soundtracks the loss of Williams’s beloved grandmother. 

Where Better Man struggles is in its attempts to fit Williams into biopic conventions that run contrary to his public persona. One of the weakest musical numbers is set to the romantic ballad “She’s The One” and captures Williams meeting fellow pop star Nicole Appleton on a yacht. As the song plays, Williams and Appleton essentially become Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers while flash-forwarding through the ups and downs of their relationship. Even with the surprising honesty of Williams’s recollection, casting Williams as a romantic hero, even in his own mind, feels out of place with the man we see before and after. The achingly earnest staging of that and other numbers feel like a vestige of Gracey’s work on The Greatest Showman. The problem is that that kind of energy is incompatible with Williams’s persona, which leaves it feeling inauthentic, which few could ever describe him as being. 

Even with the awkward melding of tones, Better Man achieves its primary mission. The film is a cracking celebration of one of British pop music’s greatest showmen and a compelling introduction to him for unfamiliar (read: North American) audiences. Speaking of, the prevailing question is whether or not US moviegoers will accept an older, wiser Robbie Williams after failing to do so three separate times. (Two separate record labels tried launching him in 1999, 2000, and 2002, with limited success.) It’s worth noting, however, that pop music from different regions is vastly more accessible than in the early 2000s and now is as good a time as any for Williams to have another crack at it. If Better Man fails to catch fire Stateside, it says less about him and more about our own staggering lack of imagination. Hopefully, we can dispatch with the monkey business and take him on.

Better Man held its Canadian Premiere as part of the Gala Presentations section at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will debut exclusively in select theaters on December 25, 2024, courtesy of Paramount Pictures. The film will expand nationwide on January 10, 2025. 

Director: Michael Gracey

Writers: Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, Michael Gracey

Rated: R

Runtime: 134m