Robbie Williams the chimp doesn’t work, but there are upsides

The primate metaphor for Robbie Williams’ arrested development at age 15 is gimmicky, but the biopic is still entertaining.

Jonno Davies as Robbie Williams in Better Man from Paramount Pictures.

You know the thought experiment about whether a million monkeys at a million typewriters could eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare? Reduce the Bard to a three-minute pop song and you have the audacious set-up of Better Man, a biopic about English singer-songwriter Robbie Williams, who is played not by himself or by a human actor but by a computer-generated chimpanzee.

The 50-year-old chart topper, who narrates his rise from working class English childhood to global superstardom, explains the thinking. “I’m Robbie Williams. I’m one of the biggest pop stars in the world. But to be honest I’ve always seen myself as a little less evolved.”

So while Williams does the narration and sings his own tunes, and the songs of his heroes such as Frank Sinatra, physically he is seen as a chimp, played by English actor Jonno Davies using ­motion capture technology.

One of the ideas, I think, is to show the animal, the angry ape, inside the pop star, and Williams does not shirk from his extensive drug and alcohol use and other bad and self-destructive ­behaviours.

At one point, pop star Nicole Appleton (Australian actor Raechelle Banno), with whom he has a relationship, calls him “an animal”, which is characteristic of the heavy-handed nature of the script. Points are not just made, they are belted out and repeated like the chorus of a pop song.

This movie is directed and co-written by Australian filmmaker Michael Gracey, who had a hit with the 2017 musical drama The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman. It was part-funded by the Victorian government and was filmed in a Melbourne studio, as well as in London, and has several Australian actors in the cast.

It opens with Williams’s childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, moves into his breakthrough at age 15 in the boy band Take That, managed by Nigel Martin-Smith (Australian actor Damon Herriman), and then his solo career.

“In five years we’re all going to hate each other, but we’ll be f..king rich,’’ Nigel tells the boys, and it’s an accurate prediction.

The teenage success goes to the evolution theme. Williams concludes he became famous at 15 and did not evolve after that. It’s a thin metaphorical basis on which to base the pop star-chimp duet.

This leads to the main question: does it work to have Williams played by a CGI chimp? Not really. No one in the story, from his parents onwards, thinks he’s a chimp.

He is treated as a human, and he walks, talks and looks like a human, if a slightly hairy one. Even that final point is laboured. “I wouldn’t change a hair of your head,’’ Williams’s grandmother tells him.

So the idea of him being a chimp exists only in his own mind.

When he performs on stage he sees former versions of his chimp self in the audience, usually threatening him, and in one over-the-top scene he fights them all with a sword, which I assume is a reference to Williams’s history of depression and self-harm. Ultimately, I think the CGI chimp is a gimmick, a ploy to make people want to see the film. Of itself it adds little to the story.

Fortunately, the film has other strengths. The first half, in particular, when Williams joins the boy band, is spectacular to watch. A scene where the band members sing – the Williams song Rock DJ – and dance through the streets of London is a highlight. It’s full of chutzpah, a bit like a Baz Luhrmann movie fuelled by the amount of ­cocaine Williams snorts.

There are some good comic moments, especially ones involving Oasis front man Liam Gallagher (Leo Harvey-Elledge). If Williams is a chimp, Gallagher is a silverback gorilla. “If I orgasmed every time I had a No.1,’’ he tells Williams, “I’d be dry.”

Another strength is that Williams acknowledges the fact he can be a lower order primate, insecure and full of self-doubt, largely due to his relationship with his cabaret-obsessed father.

“Who is Robbie Williams?” he asks at the start. He answers his own question: he is “narcissistic, punchable and just a f..king twat”, but ­despite that, or because of that, he is here to entertain you, and this movie does the same.

Better Man (MA15+)

134 minutes

In cinemas from Christmas Day

★★★