Bet­ter Man review – chim­ply irresistible

If you had asked me at the top end of 2024 how excit­ed I felt about see­ing a biopic of Rob­bie Williams direct­ed by the bloke who made The Great­est Show­man, the answer would have been a swift ​“Not at all”. Now, as a fair­ly hodaw­ful year draws to a close, I sit here with egg on my face, owing Michael Gracey an apol­o­gy, because it turns out Bet­ter Man, the musi­cal doc­u­ment­ing the rise-and-fall-and-rise of British pop’s Cheeki­est Chap­py, is gen­uine­ly good. But in my defence, when this project was announced there was absolute­ly no men­tion of The Mon­key. Because, unbe­knownst to most pri­or to the film’s pre­mière, Rob­bie Williams would not be por­trayed in his biopic by some fresh-faced Sylvia Young grad­u­ate vying for his first GQ pro­file. He would instead be played by a CGI chimpanzee.

This gim­mick came out of a com­ment Williams once made about feel­ing like a per­form­ing mon­key. It’s a stroke of genius, imme­di­ate­ly remov­ing any poten­tial com­par­i­son between a young actor and the man him­self while also allow­ing Williams to voice his own avatar, and open­ing up pos­si­bil­i­ties for the fan­tas­ti­cal in a more out­landish way than Bryan Singer man­aged with Bohemi­an Rhap­sody or Dex­ter Fletch­er with Rock­et­man. Cru­cial­ly, it works because it is tak­en seri­ous­ly by the film; there are no jokes about it, no ref­er­ences to it, no rea­son giv­en, and no oth­er apes present. It shouldn’t work, but it does – which is per­haps the sto­ry of Williams’ career.

In the film’s open­ing, Williams refers to his per­for­mance style as ​‘cabaret’, which is a help­ful way to think about the fram­ing of his biopic. Rather than a self-seri­ous tale of artis­tic integri­ty and sac­ri­fice, Gracey and Williams have craft­ed some­thing affec­tion­ate­ly self-dep­re­cat­ing and satir­i­cal. Bet­ter Man works because it is that rare biopic which acknowl­edges its inher­ent ridicu­lous­ness, pok­ing fun not only at the star machine but Williams him­self (who, regard­less of your opin­ion of his music, has always been quite open about his shortcomings).

At the same time, there are some sur­pris­ing­ly weighty moments – Williams refers to his then-girl­friend Nicole Apple­ton being pres­sured to get an abor­tion by her record label in order to main­tain her squeaky-clean pop­star image, and there’s no short­age of debauch­ery – see­ing a mon­key do lines and get a hand­job in a night­club is quite some­thing – posi­tioned as seedy rather than aspi­ra­tional. Most shock­ing is the cul­mi­na­tion of the CGI gim­mick: a hell-for-leather scene where hun­dreds of iter­a­tions of Mon­key Rob­bie face off in an epic bat­tle royale.

It is that rare biopic which choos­es to treat star­dom for the three-ring cir­cus it is, com­plete with lav­ish set-pieces of all Williams’ hits (jus­tice for my per­son­al favourite, ​‘Adver­tis­ing Space’, which doesn’t get a look-in) and an ace sup­port­ing turn from Steven Pem­ber­ton as Williams’ show­boat­ing absent father. Bom­bas­tic and know­ing­ly ridicu­lous, Bet­ter Man comes togeth­er with assured ease and per­sis­tent rough-around-the- edges charm. If there’s one major com­plaint, it’s that Gracey wast­ed the title ​‘The Great­est Show­man’ on his pre­vi­ous film when it fits so apt­ly here.