Earlier this year, after this singular biopic premiered at Telluride Film Festival, in Colorado, a large portion of the American cultural commentarial responded with a collective “huh?”. Who the hell is this [checks credits] Robbie Williams and why is he being granted a two-hour-plus feature? It was educative. Oasis weren’t a sensation there, but American music fans knew who they were. It seems Williams and Take That were barely even a footnote.
Speaking of the Atlantic divide, setting Better Man beside the recent Piece by Piece offers a rude measure of how differently music stars see themselves in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Lego documentary on Pharrell Williams, despite its unusual format, was essentially a traditional talking-heads hagiography. Better Man, which replaces Williams with a monkey, attempts a genuinely challenging critique as it takes us from childhood in Stoke-on-Trent to stardom with Take That, to controversial edging out and on to solo triumph as the unofficial high king of Britain in the FHM era.
The protracted final act, dealing with addiction issues, suffers from its similarity to so many other dramatised rock-star declines and recoveries (which is not to take away from the seriousness of his problems). But this remains an impressive juggling act between celebration and self-deprecation.
Of course the exercise is still an ego trip. The semi-fictionalised protagonist is puffed up with a class of self-importance that might well lead him to make this very film. Ego is here as much of a disease as alcoholism.
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I would love to know what that first audience in Telluride made of a recurring sentimental image: wee Robert (as he was until joining Take That) curled up with Walkers crisps and Nan (it just had to be Alison Steadman) before the Two Ronnies on a Saturday night. That kid was already a fan of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin thanks to a dad who dabbled in comedy and crooning. Steve Pemberton has a ball – and so do we – as he makes a more gentle League of Gentleman character from the old rogue.
The monkey conceit is a success on several levels. It presses home that sense of Williams being an agent of chaos in any environment. We don’t entirely blame the band for freezing him out after repeated displays of self-centred anarchy. The simian guise is also a cunning way around a difficult casting challenge. At 50, Williams, for all his current clean energy, could never stand in for the Life Through a Lens version. Deaging is never fully effective. After a few minutes any Williams-aware viewer is likely to buy the gag.
There are a few bum notes. It may be a rights issue, but the Take That section is a bit light on that band’s own songs. How odd to celebrate early success with a – thrillingly staged, to be fair – production number to Williams’s own, later Rock DJ. The brief, broad representations of Oasis remind one of nothing so much as The Beatles in the definitive rock-biopic satire Walk Hard. (Maybe that says more about Oasis than it does about either film.) And that closing inverted parabola is dragged out too long.
All that noted, it is hard to imagine how such an enterprise could be better managed. Kudos to Michael Gracey, who also directed The Greatest Showman. One doesn’t need to be a Robbie Williams fan to enjoy Better Man, but one probably does need, at least, to be aware of the phenomenon. And only that P-word will do. As Better Man reminds us, in 2003 about 375,000 people travelled to see him play at Knebworth. The film ends (of course) with him offering olive branches to his Take That pals, but that must, at the time, have felt like the sweetest revenge.
In cinemas from Thursday, December 26th
