NEW YORK (OSV News) – If nothing else, “Better Man” (Paramount), the biopic of British pop star Robbie Williams, avoids the familiar formula of show business sagas. Most fundamentally, that’s because Williams voices himself as a CGI chimpanzee.
This initially startling conceit — a stylized allegory — is presumably meant to suggest that audiences think of celebrities as little more than performing monkeys. It also implies that fans might regard Williams — who rose from a working-class background to become the best-selling British solo artist of all time — as less evolved than others.
Once the story settles into its groove, however, director and co-writer Michael Gracey, who penned the script with Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole, serves up a mostly pleasant tale. Thus Williams’ songs are enhanced with elaborate choreography — though the pain behind some of the lyrics is touched on as well.
The plot traces Williams’ experiences from 1982 to 2003. As an awkward youth in Stoke-on-Trent, the future headliner wants nothing more than to be a professional entertainer. He succinctly summarizes his own ambitions with the simple phrase, “I don’t want to be a nobody.”
Williams’ father, Peter (Steve Pemberton), is a small-time comic who performs in pubs and nurtures big dreams. But his presence in his son’s life is a limited one.
Peter teaches Robbie how to sing in the big-band style of Frank Sinatra. Yet he abandons the family at the first glimmer of possible success and only reappears occasionally thereafter. Grandmother Betty (Alison Steadman), by contrast, is Robbie’s rock — even when his mother Janet (Kate Mulvany), who struggles after Peter’s departure, has her doubts about him.
Williams gets his first break when he passes an audition to join a newly formed boy band, Take That, managed by Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman). Martin-Smith, who Williams compares to Willy Wonka, demands that young Robert become Robbie. Though Williams doesn’t like the change at first, he eventually sees it as “something I could hide behind.”
Martin-Smith is controlling but adept. After a series of appearances in gay clubs, presumably intended to perfect the group’s sexy stage moves, he unleashes Take That on hordes of screaming girls. Recordings and TV exposure follow.
In spite of his popularity with live audiences, Robbie is eventually kicked out of the ensemble, due in large part to the machinations of bandmate Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance), who sees him as a threat. The prevailing wisdom at the time, moreover, is that boy bands are passe — grunge is the latest fashion.
Proving adaptable, Williams sets out on his own. His continued professional success is not matched by his personal life, though, which is dominated for a time by his tortured romance with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) of the girl group All Saints.
Robbie gains a songwriting partner in Guy Chambers (Tom Budge). Guy teaches him how to distill his troubles into ballads that are more soulful than his previous repertoire. That’s just as well since his travails ultimately include a completely out-of-control cocaine addiction. Viewers may be left wondering how this crippling problem was allowed to go unaddressed for so long.
“Better Man” seeks neither to shock nor offend. Yet the generally frank tone it adopts overall, together with a momentary plot point involving a compelled abortion, indicates that even grown-ups should approach this retrospective with caution.
The film contains scenes of drug and alcohol abuse, a fleeting aberrant sexual encounter, a glimpse of upper female nudity, an implied abortion, numerous profanities and pervasive rough and crude language. The OSV News classification is L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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