Monkey trouble: "Better Man"

As you'll have heard, Better Man is the chimp-based Robbie Williams movie, a framing that first sounds like more gibberish from a popular cinema that has shown signs of comprehensively losing it, but which scans on some instinctive level: you can well imagine the Robbie of 1997, the one who dyed his hair Gazza blonde and started drinking with the Gallaghers and Chris Evans, masturbating in public or flinging his own poop at horrified onlookers. This one leftfield choice allows Michael Gracey, the Aussie director who broke out translating Baz Luhrmann for kids with 2017's The Greatest Showman, to attempt something new and relatively unexpected with the jukebox musical at a point, six years on from the (cough) Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody, when the form badly needs it. (I say relatively unexpected, because Better Man arrives in cinemas only a few weeks after Piece by Piece, which was Pharrell Williams done as Lego.) The movie's Williams is, in familiar fashion, a Stokey tearaway dazzled even by the tawdry limelight inhabited by his failing club singer father (Steve Pemberton, reliably good) and subsequently undergoing boyband bootcamp (where Damon Herriman, as Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, resembles Colin Firth if he were on some sort of watchlist), overnight celebrity, solo highs and lows, drink, girls, pills and depression, all the topics the real Robbie has been so candid about over the years. It's just that he's represented, in this case, by a mo-cap primate - conjured by Weta, voiced and performed by Jonno Davies - rather than BAFTA-seeking flesh-and-blood. I'll give Better Man this: at most junctures, it feels less template than test balloon, floated before us to see what the multiplex audience is now willing to swallow. What next: Olly Murs as a felt hippo?

Gracey's film is still floating within established pop biopic parameters; narratively at least, it's never as far out as I was hoping. There's surely a more piercing, arthouse-ready musical rendition of la vie Williams, perhaps one that leant more heavily into the heart-on-sleeve psychodrama of such songs as the Stephen Duffy-penned "Advertising Space" (which gets nowhere near this soundtrack). We get flickers of this adjacent movie in the aftermath of Take That's break-up, scored to "Come Undone" and featuring the image of this monkey man trapped on the other side of the thin ice he's been skating on, struggling for air. Dramatically, however, it might have been more interesting if the other characters were seen to respond in some way to the idea of Robbie-as-chimp, as they never do here. Instead, we get the multiplex-and-radio-friendly version of the greatest hits: brief sex and drugs, snarkily postmodern narration (Robbie-as-chimp-as-Deadpool), Rhesus Robbie rampaging down Regent Street to "Rock DJ", happy ending, home. (The heart does rather sink around the halfway mark upon the realisation we're going to have to experience "She's the One" and "Angels" again.) In other respects, however, Better Man proves more perplexing; the spectre of nonsense re-enters the frame. After The Greatest Showman's runaway success seven years ago, you would have thought the studios would have been begging Gracey to oversee one of these pricey New Musicals that have been coming down the pipes at regular intervals; instead, he's wound up on a project with no stars and few faces, and where the money's gone on rights clearance and a roaming computer graphic. Gracey brings much the same tits-and-teeth energy to his task as he did to his earlier hit, but it would only be admirable if Better Man felt less fatally parochial.

For a big holiday musical, Better Man doesn't look like much: even its exteriors have that wishy-washy digital sheen, as if everything beyond the chimp had also been green-screened in. (I began thinking more fondly of 2019's Rocketman, another modestly budgeted pop biopic where the flights of fancy were booked on a shoestring.) Cheap, cheerful, cheesy-to-naff: it's undeniably very Robbie, and there's an argument the anonymous approach isn't inappropriate for a film about a performer who never cracked America and wound up duetting with a cartoon cat on those Felix ads. Yet Better Man never fully answers the question of why we've been invited to witness a 140-minute movie about Robbie Williams - who, whatever else he is, is no Bowie, no Elton, no Amy Winehouse. Never mind Murs, by the time of the finale - in which Chimp Robbie declares himself a light entertainer (and that's OK) - we could almost be watching The Shane Richie Story. I'll confess I just couldn't get my head around this one, and that may be partly because I never got Robbie the first time, but it's also because I don't get where some part of the popular cinema is going, why there's a generation of cinemagoers, creatives and critics who just want their movies to be memes on a bigger screen, meant to inspire random thoughts rather than revelation or rapture. Why is Robbie a chimp? How is Nicole Appleton British all of a sudden? (Is it because Gracey couldn't afford to hire Canadian?) You look to Better Man to explain itself, to show its logic or creative reasoning, and all it can offer in return is an insouciant shrug, a CG leading man and another reprise of "Let Me Entertain You". I can't see it expanding the Williams fanbase unduly, but it feels symptomatic of a year where the movies, having long since abandoned their pretensions to being any good, decided en masse to give up making basic sense. Murs: your time is now.

Better Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide.