If you had told me at the beginning of 2024 that the best movie with a talking CGI monkey wouldn’t be Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (surprising) or Mufasa: The Lion King (unsurprising), but rather a musical biopic about Robbie Williams, a reportedly “wildly popular musician” from the U.K. that I had also never heard of, I would have told you to lay down the crack pipe and go get some help.
And yet, that Robbie Williams movie is Better Man. And it rules.
Undoubtedly if you’ve been to the movie theater at all the last 3-4 months, you’ve seen the trailers for Better Man, the monkey musical biopic, playing before just about any film. And I’m certain when you saw the trailer you had the same exact two questions as everyone else who saw the trailer:
First, “Why is this movie using a CGI chimpanzee as its main character?”
And second, “Who the hell is Robbie Williams?”
If you saw those trailers and felt a certain level of apprehension, you would be totally fair in doing so. It’s not like the musical biopic subgenre has had much to put on our plate in recent years that wasn’t simply a formula-driven IP-engine where the IP is the artist and the script is merely designed to take us through their journey of writing and performing all of their most popular hits through iconic performances recreated with actors giving their best impressions of a real person in hopes of winning an Oscar for Best Impression of an Addict (also known as Best Actor or Actress).
This year gave us the abysmal Amy Winehouse movie Back to Black in the same month as the dull Bob Marley: One Love. And while Timothee Chalamet gives an excellent performance (though second-best to Monica Barbaro) in A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic still finds James Mangold holding tight to convention.
But Better Man, much like its subject and narrator Robbie Williams, isn’t conventional.
The film begins with some narration from Williams himself walking us through what life was like for him growing up in England as we see him, a young chimpanzee, playing football with neighborhood kids and finding it hard to fit in. Of course it’s not the fact that he’s a chimp that is the cause of this isolation, it’s the fact that Robbie has passions beyond playing football with the boys in the yard.
Robbie’s father, Peter (Steve Pemberton), instills in him at an early age a passion for the great entertainers — guys like Sammie Davis, Jr. and Frank Sinatra. But coupled with that passion, Peter also drills into Robbie that those great performers have “It”, that magical X-factor that makes them magnetic forces on stage. And according to Peter, “if you don’t have it, you’re nothing.”
This moment early in Better Man sets in motion almost all of the film’s events. Because Better Man isn’t simply interested in telling us the story of Williams’ life through the eyes of a monkey. It’s telling the story of a man desperate to prove to his father that he has “It”, no matter what it costs him and how much of a literal dancing monkey he has to be for the masses in order to prove that he has “It.”
From a plot perspective, Better Man largely follows the average “story about a celebrity gaining fame” formula. We see Williams achieve his first steps of fame in the U.K. boy band Take That, deal with slimy managers, break up with his crew, and take on his solo act as he finds love, loss and plenty of drugs and alcohol along the way.
And while it may be slightly jarring at first to see a chimpanzee living the high life smoking, drinking and getting the kind of special party favors that groupies give musicians on the road, WETA Digital (the same Digital FX studio behind Andy Serkis’s Caesar and the rest of the apes in Fox’s Planet of the Apes franchise) does incredible work here. Not only does Robbie’s chimp look excellent, but you can see how WETA incorporated some of Williams’ features into the design to contain enough of his essence to remind us at all times who we are really watching.
Beyond the CGI monkey, what sets Better Man apart from the rest of its paint-by-numbers peers is the ways in which it incorporates the presentation of Williams’ catalogue of music. Most biopics tend to take the path of least resistance and give audiences what they think they want to see: the origin story of every popular song for the bad or artist (think Eazy-E struggling to find his voice for Boyz-N-tha-Hood in Straight Outta Compton) or iconic performances perfectly lined up to the original recordings as if getting the chance to see them for real (think the Wembley Stadium segment of Bohemian Rhapsody). For Better Man, director Michael Gracey rings his musical spectacle skills from films like The Greatest Showman to the forefront and makes the songs in Better Man punctuation marks in Williams’ life.
Instead of each song being performed by Williams on a stage or in a sound studio, Gracey takes the same approach as the last great musical biopic, 2019’s excellent Elton John picture, Rocketman, and makes these songs work as the soundtrack to major moments in Williams’ life.
“Rock DJ” isn’t simply a big concert performance, it’s Robbie bursting out onto the streets of England and taking his solo career by storm in a massive song-and-dance musical number full of passersby joining in. “She’s the One” is one of the film’s more beautiful sequences that finds Robbie meeting and falling in love with future partner Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) in a beautiful dance number with dazzling lights and dreams of what could and would not be in their lives. “Angels” could have easily been used as a cheap emotional moment in the studio but instead it’s used as a punctuation mark to highlight Williams’ emotional turmoil and perseverance with a major death in his life.
But perhaps one of the most jaw-dropping of all is “Let Me Entertain You” where Robbie, performing for a record-size crowd faces the ghosts of his past and deals head-on with all of the doubts and fears that have plagued him his entire career. It’s a cathartic moment of self-reflection and growth played out in an insane flurry of CGI spectacle that is as pulse-pounding as it is heartbreaking.
And while much of Williams’ story hits a lot of the same obstacles and beats of similar stories, Williams’ energy and voice as a narrator propels this forward. The film shifts in and out of reality into fantastical portrayals of events to highlight their absurdity, giving us more a glimpse into how their felt rather than simply what happened.
Better Man is a clever film, and certainly one of the most surprising of 2024; hell-bent on breaking convention where possible and in true Robbie Williams fashion, intent on being wildly entertaining. It certainly surprised me and took a sub-genre that I could hardly care about and flips it on its head, delivering an exciting ride culminating in a powerful tearjerker of a finale that may have you saying, much like this reviewer, “I can’t believe I’m crying in the monkey movie.”
RATING: ★★★★
Better Man is now playing in select theaters, playing everywhere January 10.
Brandon Toks Movies 
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