Better Man (2024)

Rated R for some really densely packed swearing throughout.  Man, there is some cursing on a next level.  There's also a pretty explicit sex scene that doesn't show any nudity.  It doesn't change the fact that it is incredibly graphic.  And like with most music biopics, there's an impressive amount of drugs in this movie.  Here's the deal.  I wish that the movie wasn't R so I could watch this movie regularly.  But if it wasn't R, it wouldn't be this movie either.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Michael Gracey

I don't even understand me anymore.  I rally against music biopics.  I say they're all the same.  They're always about musicians falling into drugs and being terrible people only to come out the other side seeing freedom through music.  Better Man?  Same deal.  But do you know what?  Better Man might be one of my favorite movies of 2024.  I wasn't prepped for that.

It might be that it was because I wasn't prepped for that.  I was so ready to write this movie off.  I mean, for all my pop culture obsession, I know nothing of music.  From what I understand, Robbie Williams is a huge deal internationally who never really penetrated the cultural zeitgeist in America.  These should be points against a movie about him.  From my perspective, he's a dude.  But do you know what?  It might actually help a movie like Better Man.  Better Man might be playing on my lack of investment, completely destroying anything that I thought I was going to get out of this movie.  Honestly, I can not speak more highly about this movie.  I do have an inkling about why I really loved it.  

As much as I've been rallying against the music biopic subgenre, there has always been one exception to the rule: Rocketman.  Well, Michael Gracey was a producer on Rocketman and it shows.  I might like Better Man better than Rocketman.  It's almost like the title is meant to be a commentary on the quality of the same sub-sub-genre of film.  Crazy, right?  The jukebox musical is either a love it or hate it thing.  But what makes Better Man a better version of Rocketman is its freedom to get a little weird.  Honestly, Better Man is more grounded than the trailers make it out to be.  I guess I should discuss the monkey in the room, but the monkey stuff doesn't matter.  As much as I'm saying the movie is free to get weird, the monkey stuff isn't what pulls it into a bizarre place.  It doesn't hurt.  I can't deny that.  But you get used to the monkey stuff pretty quick.

The great part, which makes me like Better Man more than --say --A Complete Unknown is that the movie is about knowing who Robbie Williams is as a human being over simply being a glorification of his music. The music gets its play and is super valuable.  I don't want to downplay any of that.  I'm more long the line of the notion that the movie is obsessed with getting Robbie Williams's take on each beat of his life.  Because Williams is the protagonist coupled with narrator, there is a glorious bias (I'm not being sarcastic --he imbues each historical event with his perspective coupled with unfiltered opinions on that moment) to each thing.  On top of that, while much of the film does hit on music biopic tropes, it almost seems like it doesn't care so much that Williams is a mega star so much as he is a deeply flawed individual.

Yeah, other movies have tried.  I'll even say that other movies have succeeded at this.  But there's the opening with little Robbie (again, an ape) failing at being a soccer star.  The movie builds on the idea that, while he wants superstardom, it is because he's desperate for even the slightest bit of love from anyone besides his grandmother.  I will admit  --and I've posted this in other film blogs --that I'm a sucker for dad issues.  Man alive, did this movie sell the "dad issue" story.  Like, I was close to tears by the end.  If I'm trying to prove that this is more about acceptance than fame, I think that most of my evidence comes from Dad.  This is vulnerable stuff here, so please be patient with me.  My dad died when I was 12.  (Already you feel bad for me.  I don't blame you.  Like Robbie Williams, I am desperate for your acceptance.) The man was incredibly smart.  No joke, he was a full-on member of MENSA.  Do you understand how many dreams and daydreams I have about meeting my father and trying to impress him?  Honestly, I write an essay about every movie I watch.  There's something fundamentally broken about that.

Before I get off the dad thing, I do want to talk about my bittersweet reaction to the movie.  Again, this is a true story made by the guy who lived it.  In real life, Robbie Williams threw his deadbeat dad a bone and let him do a duet of "My Way" by Frank Sinatra, despite the fact that his father was addicted to trying to get fame.  My bittersweetness comes from the fact that I adore that Robbie Williams, through therapy and rehab, got to a point in his life that he was able to forgive his dad and give him the thing that he wanted the most.  But I also am in this camp that says it almost would have been happier to cut his dad out of his life.  Again, there's something toxic about that too.  There are a bunch of things in the movie that Robbie Williams is morally responsible for. There are things that he needs to atone for.  But I feel like there had to have his father make the moral choice to beg for an apology.  Like, I feel like his dad leaves just as broken as he started the movie.  But that might be actually more of a commentary on Robbie Williams's mental health.  He doesn't need his dad to apologize.  He can sing a song with his dad simply because he wanted to sing a song with his dad.  As much as it was making his dad's dream come true, Robbie does it to be selfish in the best way possible.

And, Geez Louise, this movie aggressively talks about mental health. Now we're talking about the ape thing.  (I've shifted out of "monkey" as a term because I think "ape" is more accurate.)  From a practical perspective, you want Robbie Williams to play himself.  But Robbie Williams is also significantly older than he was during these events.  I know that there's another actor playing Williams and I'm not quite sure about the beat-for-beat moments when the handoff is made.  Doesn't matter.  The movie never gets explicit with its choice to make a real human look like an ape the entire time.  But I love the little teases to the imagery in the movie.  Throughout the story, there are moments of Robbie describing himself as an animal.  As much as there are real villains in this story, most notably his father, Robbie hates himself.  Again, the movie is about acceptance.  The idea of distancing himself from humanity proper is the notion of other.  As an ape, Robbie has a difficult time settling for what other people have accepted as normal.  He stands out from the crowd.  His behavior is often written off because "That's just Robbie."  But when he's an ape, it's almost saying that there's something biological behind his actions.  

Then the imagery gets more intense. One of the recurring motifs is the notion of seeing his younger selves in the crowd.  Robbie hates himself. I get it.  I often hate myself too.  (Like Robbie, though, I also think I'm the greatest thing to walk Planet Earth.  Keep this paradox in mind when you talk to me.) But those apes serve multiple purposes.  The first thing is that they stand out.  They aren't people in the crowd.  You stick a human Robbie in the audience, he gets lost immediately.  You stick an ape in that crowd, that creature comes across as threatening.  It wants to kill Robbie in his present form.  And do you know what is spectacular?  These are other forms of Robbie that we saw previously in the movie who were also threatened by other versions of himself.  It's incredible.  The fact that it all becomes this surreal brawl at this event, without giving much context to what is real and what is imagined, lets us feel what it might mean to disassociate as Williams.  It works really well.

I don't know, man.  Maybe I don't hate biopics.  Maybe I hate safe biopics.  There has been such a string of safe biopics that I need stuff that kind of blows the roof off of the subgenre.  I can't keep going to the same well.  It needs to get bizarre.  It needs to get vulnerable.  Better Man works not only as an expose of a persona, but also as an incredible musical.  Musicals are allowed to play with reality more than other movies are.  (I don't even believe that sentence...but it is a shorthand for a much larger concept that I don't have the energy to explain.) By embracing this as a weird musical, I learned to love an artist I know almost nothing about.    Better Man is incredible.  I know that A Complete Unknown is going to get all of the attention, but Better Man is where it's at.