Great Showmen
the tired biopic gets reimagined and spit-polished to an absolute shine.
Better Man
Director: Michael Gracey • Writers: Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, Michael Gracey
Starring: Robbie Williams, Johno Davies, Alison Steadman, Steve Pemberton, Damon Herriman
UK / USA / Australia • 2hrs 15mins
Opens Hong Kong Jan 16 • IIB
Grade: A-
Director Michael Gracey takes the entertainer as “trained circus chimp” metaphor all the way to its literal end in his deliciously subversive Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. I know. Biopic. The word is shudder-inducing. Will there be montages? A drug and/or alcohol-fuelled flame out? Is there a raggy origin story, a blistering rise to fame and a crash right after alienating the central star’s last remaining friend? Of course there will, don’t be daft. But Gracey and his co-writers, Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole, are defiantly eager to embrace all those conventions in the chronicle of Williams’s well-documented rock star career. It’s a big ask to demand we take the subject of the story at face value as a six-foot-ish chimpanzee with spiky gelled, sometimes blond, hair, an affinity for Frank Sinatra and a raging coke habit. But a stellar cast plays it straight and after the initial five-minute jolt of “WTF, I didn’t want to see Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes!” it becomes second nature.
It’s been said in these pages, recently, that a big swing and a miss is better than no swing at all (looking at you, Mufasa) – and Gracey’s aiming for the bleachers in Better Man. Metaphors aside, Williams has stated publicly in the past that he often saw himself as slightly beastly and barely mature enough to walk erect. Naturally when it came to making a biopic Gracey, a VFX guy, and Williams decided to draw him that way. And here we are. In his follow-up to the surprise hit The Greatest Showman (that film’s fingerprints are all over this) Gracey combines a tremendous mo-cap performance from Johno Davies with pitch perfect CG, an equally perfect vocal turn from Williams and stellar music passages for a biopic all others should aspire to. You don’t even have to like Robbie Williams to dig this.
He’s been called worse
Williams, the youngest member of ’90s Brit boy band Take That (“Back for Good”, “A Million Love Songs”), was always the cheeky one of that outfit; the irreverent bad boy who wouldn’t do as he was told – and who was prime fodder for solo stardom; he was Take That’s Michael Jackson, Ricky Martin or Harry Styles. So it’s no surprise that Better Man is similarly cheeky, irreverent and won’t do as its told. Williams is an executive producer as well as star, though unlike, say, Bohemian Rhapsody, he’s not holding the song rights hostage for image rehab. Granted it’s a double edged sword. Trying to sand the rough edges off Williams as a character would be disingenuous considering a quick Google throws up all manner of unflattering story, but it also makes the film very on the nose, and very on brand. Better Man falls somewhere between Rocketman and Elvis on the sliding scale of hagiography, warts-and-all reflection and exuberant creativity.
We’re introduced to Williams, narrating his own story, as a kid playing football with the other Stoke-on-Trent neighbourhood kids and of course getting teased for being a shitty goalkeeper. We meet his father, Peter (Steve Pemberton), a failed but aspirational Rat Pack type entertainer who instils the beauty of Sinatra into young Robert, and who Williams idolises – then despises when Peter follows his dreams and dumps him, his mother Janet (Kate Mulvany) and his beloved Nan, Betty (Alison Steadman) for the bright lights of London. But then music manager and Take That svengali Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) – who gets a foul-mouthed, clearly no-love-lost but cleared by legal! intro in the VO – holds auditions in town, Robert becomes Robbie, and do I really have to detail what comes next? No. No, I do not.
Gracey follows the biopic beats to the letter, but there’s an almost anarchic glee in doing so; he knows how tired the tropes are and takes every opportunity to make a meta commentary on them – but not in an irritating, acknowledging way. The self-awareness serves the story almost as much as the soundtrack does, the best of Williams catalogue repurposed in emotional order rather than chronological. Williams was either presciently self-aware in his earliest lyrics or life started imitating art, but there’s a song to fit each milestone and Gracey goes utterly bananas (see what I did there?) in staging them. The car crash that comes after Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance) fires his ass is set to an impressionistic “Come Undone”; Robbie’s first meeting with All Saints’ Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) ends in a duet that recalls Showman’s “Rewrite the Stars” set to (duh) “She’s The One”; the funeral montage of “Angels” is one of the most seamlessly edited biopic montages ever and has the audacity to be genuinely moving; and “Let Me Entertain You” is a brilliant, brutal, creature feature throwdown at the massive Knebworth Festival, in which Williams literally battles versions of himself he can barely abide and sinks to the requisite biopic Rock Bottom. The film’s high point is “Rock DJ” (a Broadway-ready re-recording), pure musical, glittery Baz Luhrmann-esque joy, one fluid long take (by Paddington DOP Erik A Wilson with boggling choreographer by Moulin Rouge!’s Ashley Wallen) that races through the Take That years all over Regent Street. Just imagining the logistics gives me a headache. Better Man is a high concept gamble that shouldn’t work, but does precisely because Gracey and Williams thought, “Fuck it, why not?” It’s proof you can play by the rules and still play with them – and it never forgets it’s about a rock star. See it in a theatre where they’ve jacked the volume.