“The energy I’ve used to be a showman, is: ‘Fuck, this is the biggest bluff ever, people are going to find out in the next three seconds…’” That’s how the British popstar Robbie Williams once described his attitude towards performing. “They’re going to find out! Move! Keep moving! Do some stuff! Do some stuff!” Williams said this around 2016, well into a discography that had already endured several waves of mega-superstardom. His words speak to an anxious, ongoing need not just to entertain, but to distract, to overact, to keep the audience unmoored, all in an effort to hide deep and intractable feelings of inadequacy.
Now, he’s gone and made a movie about it – a movie which not only depicts but embodies this sentiment. Better Man gives us an occasionally fictionalized overview of Robbie Williams’s life and career, from his beginnings as a show-offy working-class kid from Stoke-on-Trent (“the ass end of the north of England”), to his unlikely stardom as a member of the 1990s boy-band Take That, to his stratospheric success as a solo artist. The film hits all the expected pit-stops of addiction and alcoholism and heartbreak and egomania along the way. But it does so with a blazing, restless inventiveness that goes beyond mere sensationalism into something downright pathological. We sense behind the screen the terror of someone who still worries we’ll find out he’s been bluffing all along.
To be clear, Better Man is directed by Michael Gracey – and boy, is it ever – but Williams has definitely exerted his share of creative control. The movie marinates in his trickster theater-kid spirit. The singer voices himself in this biopic, while the motion capture actor Jonno Davies plays him as a British lad with the face of (no joke) a CGI monkey. Introducing the picture at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Gracey and Williams noted that the monkey idea came from the director asking his subject early on what kind of animal he saw himself as. The singer first replied, “A lion,” then realized he wasn’t kidding anybody and admitted he saw himself as a monkey – a wild performer, whether in the service of others or for his own egomaniacal ends.
Amazingly, the monkey conceit, while certainly strange (and let’s also add, beautifully rendered, with human qualities that give us a full range of emotions while also looking a lot like Robbie Williams), is not the craziest thing in Better Man. That honor would go to the picture’s musical numbers, which Gracey (whose previous feature was the 2017 hit The Greatest Showman) stages with such berserk ferocity that once they’re over, we might have trouble believing what we’ve just witnessed. His camera swirls around and rises above and plunges below his actors, sling-shotting itself into and through scenes, even as the scenes themselves rapidly shift location and context. The performers strut and bounce and pirouette and leap into and out of costumes. Pogo sticks and gumballs and flares and fireworks and scooters and double-decker buses and cemeteries and country roads become putty in the director’s hands. Streetlights turn into the raging red fires of hell. The fields of Knebworth transform into medieval slaughter-fest, covered in blood and smoke. The movie isn’t just “crazy” – it’s crazy. Trying to describe it, one sounds like a lunatic.
The unpredictable, improvisatory vigor of these musical numbers is an artful illusion. They have clearly been choreographed and planned to within an inch of their lives, as evidenced by the precision of the cutting, by the way the dance moves echo distant gestures in other scenes. In what might be the film’s most moving section, Robbie meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), lead singer of the all-girl band All Saints, one New Year’s Eve at a masked party on a boat. Gracey interweaves their ensuing duet with future episodes from their doomed, whirlwind romance (which would, in real life, last barely a year) – their hard partying, their engagement, as well as the abortion Nicole is forced into by her record company so she can continue to front a popular girl-group. An elegant dip in their lonely dance becomes a flashback to a quick, crouched drink at a crowded party. A few skips into a spinning embrace become one lover running after another inside a dark memory. And yet, here they are, still in the midst of their intoxicating first encounter. It feels like a classic musical romance; you’d never guess that Robbie Williams went on to have many high-profile lovers, or that he’s been happily married for the past 14 years to someone else.
There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with pat dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is then constantly upended by completely batshit musical sequences. Could the collision be intentional? Weirdly, the familiarity of the biographical beats ease us into the formal daring. If its structure and script were as unhinged as its style, the film might have been unwatchable. In their own way, these disparate elements serve to undercut the musical biopic genre: one by replicating its tropes to a satirical degree, the other by sending the whole thing spinning into another dimension.
At this point, some readers might find themselves wondering: Who the hell is Robbie Williams? At that aforementioned Toronto screening, the singer himself acknowledged this dilemma with his usual mix of self-effacement and cheeky grandiosity, noting that he has almost no North American following and giving a playful shout-out to “My American fan down there,” in the Toronto audience. He then reassured us that “everywhere else, I’m kind of a big deal.” He really is; the guy has broken multiple industry records in the U.K.
I will admit that back during Williams’s 1990s and early 2000s heyday, I read the British pop press regularly and found him entertaining mostly as the Gallagher brothers’ favorite punching bag. (Liam would eventually marry Nicole Appleton.) I knew he was huge, but the few songs I heard, I quickly forgot. Still, the man was ubiquitous, constantly in the limelight, always saying or doing something silly, as if he was desperate for more attention despite having already achieved superstardom. This made him, as he himself would admit, quite annoying. (“A narcissistic, punchable, shit-eating twat” is how he introduces himself in the film. It’s also how he signs off at the end.) But watching Better Man, I found myself thinking back on why Williams’s antics made so many of us uncomfortable. Through the sheer audacity of its filmmaking, this movie articulates it better than we ever could. It’s the parasitic paradox of fame, and of that feedback loop of adulation: If they ever stop screaming for you, they’ll start to see right through you.
