Most male music icons would prefer to be portrayed on screen by stars.
Most male music icons would prefer to be portrayed on screen by the starry, swaggering likes of Timothee Chalamet (Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown"), Austin Butler (Elvis Presley in "Elvis') and Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody").
Just don't include British pop bad boy Robbie Williams in that lineup. In "Better Man," now in theaters, Williams has chosen to make a literal monkey out of himself and be portrayed by a computer-generated chimpanzee, saying that he always felt "less evolved than other people."
Actor Jonno Davies stands in for Robbie using motion capture like Andy Serkis did in the rebooted "Planet of the Apes" franchise with Williams himself doing the narration and songs.
Yes, it's bananas. But it also works, often thrillingly so when it resists the usual biopic cliches that offer a glorified, watered-down version of a life. Not with this primitive primate.
Director Michael Gracey, who put the show in "The Greatest Showman" with Hugh Jackman as huckster supreme P.T. Barnum, runs with the offbeat ape idea. OK, sometimes he runs it into the ground. But mostly he goes ape with style to spare.
Williams never hit the fame heights in the U.S. that he did in the UK, but his profane, disrupter appeal coupled with the Gracey's gung-ho style re-energizes the tired tropes until they sing like new. It only takes a few minutes to get used to the simian Williams and then we're off.
"Better Man" starts off with little Robbie, a misfit at school, standing in front of the telly with his dad, Peter (a terrific Steve Pemberton), singing along to Frank Sinatra's "My Way." Dad soon abandons his wife and Robbie for a third-rate career on the club circuit, leaving Robbie to turn to his grandmother Betty (the great Allison Steadman) for comfort and support.
Then, boom, Robbie nails an audition for Take That, a boy band whose success leads him to fame as its youngest, most unruly member. His cocaine addiction pits him against manager Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman) and bandmate Gary Barlow (a hilarious Jake Simmance).
A romance with pop singer Nicole Appleton, nicely played by Raechelle Banno, lightens the load, especially in "She's the One," set on a yacht in Saint-Tropez that condenses their past, present and future into a single, smashing dance number.
Robbie -- ousted from the band for raging egomania -- goes solo to huge success, more drugs, detox, rehab, a breakdown and a losing battle with success that takes him years to overcome.
It's screenwriting 101, and another film would be crushed by the platitude overload. But Gracey by sheer force of will won't let that happen. His visionary, often surreal staging of the musical sequences is off the charts for style and rule-breaking experimentation.
There's Robbie flying upside down at a packed concert, leaping from the top of a double-decker bus on London's famous Regent Street, singing the ballad "Come Undone" underwater, challenging Oasis' Liam Gallagher to a fist fight on live TV (that really happened), and peeling off his skin and throwing it at the audience in the "Rock DJ" showstopper (that maybe didn't).
"Better Man," ends with a 2003 live concert at London's Royal Albert Hall in which Robbie and the ghosts of his ape past work out a truce that might make him -- you guessed it -- a better man. It's hard to tell what's real or not in this bizarro biopic and it's likely you won't care after being swept away for two hours on waves of ravishing music and nonstop monkeyshines.
Today, at 50, Robbie has two decades of life madness that "Better Man" doesn't even cover. Let's hope there's a sequel. You can never get too much of Robbie's brand of too much.
