“Fuck yourselves,” are the final words spoken by Robbie Williams in his new biopic, Better Man. Delivered as a mic drop voice-over, sandwiched between a rendition of “My Way” and the end credits, it’s a double barb that reflects Williams’s double-edged relationship with the public eye. An idealistic drama student from Stoke-on-Trent and noted “little bastard” of Nineties boyband Take That, Robbie Williams was thrust into the limelight as a teenager in a country with a punitive celebrity culture. A culture that gives with one hand and prods people’s insecurities with the other; a culture that mines celebrities’ personal lives for tabloid fodder, then tells them they should be grateful for the privilege. Over his decades-long career as boyband pin-up and renegade solo artist, Williams has been worshipped and underestimated, admired and derided, sexualised and despised – often at the same time. The film’s sign-off, then, is both a declaration of victory and a built-in defence mechanism. “Fuck yourselves” as in I told you so. “Fuck yourselves” as in I know there will be people who still dislike me, and I don’t care.
On the face of it, Better Man is an eccentric property: a musical biopic with a 135-minute runtime in which Williams is played by a CGI monkey in an otherwise human cast. Directed by The Greatest Showman’s Michael Gracey, the concept came from candid interviews the pair recorded over a year and a half (much of the voice-over narration is audio taken directly from those interviews). The image of a monkey came up repeatedly whenever Williams talked about how he sees himself – as a cheeky monkey, a performing monkey, an unevolved man (in the film he says that the age you become famous is the age you stop evolving, making him effectively a 15-year-old boy). This became Gracey’s key to unlocking the biopic.
It’s admittedly an extra sprinkle of intrigue to get people who aren’t necessarily Robbie Williams fans through the door. But the monkey thing is far more than the novelty it could easily have ended up being. Rather, it’s a device that allows for more surreal explorations of depression and alienation, which hit much harder than they would have with a fully human lead in a strictly governed reality. In that sense, Better Man shares more DNA with the Netflix series Bojack Horseman, an animated tragicomedy about a self-destructive, alcoholic horse in Hollywood, than musical biopics like Rocket Man or Bohemian Rhapsody.
The monkey, played by actor Jonno Davies in motion capture (Williams does the voice-over and singing), also helps circumvent some of the prejudices Robbie Williams has faced throughout his career, allowing people to see past the class clown façade. When he’s being beat down – abandoned by his dad, chided as replaceable by ex-Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, laughed out of the vocal booth while wearing a Paul Heaton “Northern Scum” beanie – you feel more protective of him. When he’s lashing out, you feel more cautious. As Gracey put it in one interview, “I genuinely think the monkey allows us to see more of Robbie.” The tone, it must be said, would be a lot darker if it were a man getting a handjob from a fan and snorting fat lines of gear in his kitchen. Instead, these moments come across in purely primal terms – both funny and heartbreaking.
Better Man tries to do a lot of things at once and, for the most part, pulls it off. It’s a big-screen drama of a man at war with his demons – quite literally, Braveheart-style, in one scene at Knebworth. It’s a musical that rearranges some of Williams’s greatest hits, from “Feel” to “Angels”, into West End show tunes. It’s a coming-of-age story turned underdog redemption arc, with a knowing wink that guards against self-pity. In short: Billy Elliot for people who grew up on Football Italia and Page 3. And, like the best Robbie hits, Better Man is a raw portrayal of masculinity, addiction and the Faustian bargain of fame. His story is also inseparable from the wider context in which he exists, functioning, too, as a parable of British working class aspiration. “I’m just a chav that got everything they ever wanted,” he tells his rehab group in one scene. “It’s a bit fucking embarrassing, to be frank. I was taught that fame would solve everything…”
The chips have always been stacked against Robbie Williams, one way or another. Even in the role of Take That bad boy, he was sold short. (When he quit in 1995, taking the group’s sex appeal with him, the Samaritans provided a special helpline to counsel fans through their distress.) No matter what he achieves, there will always be a corresponding narrative in which he’s treated as a punchline. His fame somehow unearned, his music “cabaret” (read: tacky). He began to incorporate that into his narrative early on, entering the stage at Knebworth in 2003 – where he deliberately topped Oasis’ record by performing three sold out shows back-to-back – strung-up by his ankles with his arms outstretched. The antiChrist who already crucified himself.
Better Man self-consciously re-enacts that narrative. It practically begs to be mocked before it’s been seen – a biopic about who? Played by a what?? – setting up expectations and then exploding them. The coverage of the film has played into this dynamic, as reviews are strewn with backhanded compliments about how the film works “better than you might think”, over-emphasising the fact that Americans don’t know who he is. And why would they? Robbie Williams is the sentient id of the English lad. He’s a packet of Walkers in the back of a Ford Fiesta and a packet of something else down the social club. As he sings of the country, its media and its public, on “Come Undone”: “I’m scum / And I’m your son.” His songs might be universal, but as an entity he makes as much sense Stateside as a Pot Noodle.
Robbie Williams has a lot of critics. Some that will exist no matter what, others he’s created over the course of being a “little bastard”. In the end, Better Man has been deservedly lauded because he doesn’t point the finger at fame, or his father, or Gary Barlow, but at himself. His 2023 four-part Netflix documentary attempted to do the same, but the face to camera setup and confessional tone irritated some viewers. By contrast, the film’s conceit forces people to look beyond the image of Robbie – the defensive ego, the peroxide gel spikes, all the times he invited Liam Gallagher out for a fight – and meet Robert: a boy from a broken home who loves Frank Sinatra and “dents easy.” He’s been telling us this for years, smuggling lyrics about addiction into pop banger “Let Me Entertain You” and quipping in interviews “My inner voice talks to me like Katie Hopkins talks about fat people”. He just needed to become a literal monkey to get the point across.
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