I’m trying to describe the Robbie Williams biopic Better manone sounds like a madman.
Photo: Paramount Pictures

“The energy I had as a showman is, ‘Shit, this is the biggest bluff ever, people are going to find out in the next three seconds…'” That’s how British pop star Robbie Williams once described his attitude towards performing. “You’ll find out!” Move! Keep moving! Do some things! Do some stuff!” Williams said this around 2016, in the middle of a discography that had already endured several waves of mega-superstardom. His words speak of an anxious, persistent need not only to entertain but also to distract, to exaggerate, to unnerve the audience, all in an effort to conceal deep and persistent feelings of inadequacy.

Now he has made a film about it – a film that not only depicts this feeling, but embodies it. Better man gives us a occasionally fictionalized overview of Robbie Williams’ life and career, from his beginnings as a pretentious working-class boy from Stoke-on-Trent (“the asshole in the north of England”) to his unlikely fame as a member of the 1990s boy band Take That , to his stratospheric success as a solo artist. The film reaches all the expected climaxes of addiction, alcoholism, heartbreak and egomania. But it happens with a fervent, restless inventiveness that goes beyond mere sensationalism and seems downright pathological. What we sense behind the screen is the fear of someone who is still afraid that we might find out he was bluffing all along.

To be clear: Better man is directed by Michael Gracey – and boy, is it – but Williams has definitely exercised his share of creative control. The film exudes its trickster-theatre-kid spirit. The singer voices himself in this biopic, while motion capture actor Jonno Davies plays him as a British boy with the face (no joke) of a CGI monkey. When Gracey and Williams introduced the film at the Toronto Film Festival in September, they noted that the monkey idea came from the director asking his subject early on what kind of animal he considered himself to be. The singer first answered, “A lion,” then realized he wasn’t kidding anyone and admitted that he saw himself as a monkey – a fierce performer, whether in the service of others or for his own selfish purposes.

Amazingly, while the monkey’s conceit is certainly strange (and let us add, beautifully rendered, with human qualities that at the same time give us a wide range of emotions). looks a lot like Robbie Williams), isn’t the craziest thing in Better man. That honor would go to the film’s musical numbers, which include Gracey (whose previous feature was the 2017 hit). The greatest showman) Stages of such insane ferocity that once they’re over, we may find it hard to believe what we’ve just seen. His camera swirls around, rising above and below the actors, darting in and through scenes as the scenes themselves rapidly change location and context. The performers strut and hop, pirouette and jump in and out of costumes. Pogo sticks, gumballs, flares, fireworks, scooters, double-decker buses, cemeteries and country roads become putty in the director’s hands. Street lights turn into raging red fires of hell. The fields of Knebworth are transformed into a medieval slaughter festival, covered in blood and smoke. The film isn’t just “crazy” – it is crazy. Trying to describe it makes you sound like a crazy person.

The unpredictable, improvisational power of these musical numbers is an artful illusion. They were clearly choreographed and planned down to the last inch of their lives, as evidenced by the precision of the editing and the way the dance moves echo distant gestures in other scenes. In perhaps the most moving part of the film, Robbie meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), lead singer of the all-girl band All Saints, at a masquerade party on a boat on New Year’s Eve. Gracey links her subsequent duet to future episodes of her doomed, whirlwind romance (which would barely last a year in real life) – her hard partying, her engagement, as well as the abortion Nicole is forced to have by her record label preside. An elegant leap into their lonely dance becomes a flashback to a quick, sipped drink at a crowded party. A few hops in a whirling embrace becomes one lover running after the other in a dark memory. And yet here they are, still in the midst of their exhilarating first encounter. It feels like a classic musical romance; You would never guess that Robbie Williams went on to have many high-profile lovers, or that he has been happily married to someone else for 14 years.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (mistakenly) with snappy dialogue about the dangers of fame and the double life of fame and abandonment issues and so on, then constantly punctuated by utter nonsense Musical sequences are turned upside down. Could the collision be intentional? Strangely, the familiarity of the biographical beats makes the formal daring easier for us. If its structure and script were as unhinged as its style, the film might have been unwatchable. In their own ways, these different elements serve to subvert the musical biopic genre: one reproduces its tropes in a satirical way, the other sends the whole thing into another dimension.

At this point some readers may be wondering: Who the hell is Robbie Williams? At the aforementioned Toronto screening, the singer himself acknowledged this dilemma with his usual mix of self-possession and cheeky grandiosity, noting that he had almost no North American following and jokingly shouting “My American fan down there” at the Toronto audience. Then he assured us, “Everywhere else I’m a big deal.” He really is; The guy has broken several industry records in the UK

I admit that I was a regular reader of the British pop press during Williams’ heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s, and found him particularly entertaining as the Gallagher brothers’ favorite punching bag. (Liam would eventually marry Nicole Appleton.) I knew he was big, but I quickly forgot the few songs I heard. Yet the man was ever-present, constantly in the spotlight and always saying or doing something stupid, as if he was desperate for more attention even though he had already become a superstar. This, by his own admission, made him quite annoying. (“A narcissistic, quick-witted, shit-eating cunt,” is how he introduces himself in the film. That’s also how he says goodbye at the end.) But watch Better manI thought about why Williams’ antics made so many of us uncomfortable. Through the sheer audacity of his cinematic work, this film expresses it better than we ever could. It’s the parasitic paradox of fame and that feedback loop of admiration: If they ever stop screaming for you, they’ll start to see through you.