Do you find yourself tired of the biopic genre? For some, the category of filmmaking has gone the way of superhero films. You know the beats. You know how the story is going to go, and then you crave something…a little more. Michael Gracey’s film does not share that problem, however. You have never seen anything like Better Man, the musical biopic grenade detailing the rise, fall, and rebirth of Robbie Williams. The director set himself free to explore an artist whose frivolity made people fall in love with him but whose excesses nearly cost him everything.
Williams was vital in my personal coming-of-age. His music video for “Rock DJ” is confident and over-the-top–just like Williams himself–and it vibrates with a sexual danger that most mainstream musical artists are wary of expressing. I know a lot of fans of Williams who are just as passionate as me, but there are many people who have never heard of him. Gracey never considered himself a superfan, but that changed when he came on board this musical.
“Growing up in Australia, Robbie was huge,” Gracey says. “I am a few years younger than him, but it did mean that when he was at the height of his fame, I was going through the formative musicals years of my life. I have seen him in concert inboth Australia and in the UK. I will admit that he wasn’t on my Spotify favorites or anything, but you couldn’t escape him. I know every one of his songs. Over the course of this profect and reimagining the music, I have become such a fan. He knows what it means to be a great showman. I recently saw him at Hyde Park, and even with a crowd that big, he holds them all in his hand. He has this effortless quality, and it’s why some people are a star and some people aren’t. It’s amazing. For me, it’s also a relatable thing about a kid idolizing his dad, and he wants his dad to look at him like how he looks at Sinatra.”
Monkey this, monkey that. In case you haven’t heard, Gracey’s film employs a surprising visual effect: Robbie Williams is a played by a monkey in an ode to how he sees himself. I admitted to Gracey that when I first watched Better Man, I kept repeating, ‘This shouldn’t work…this shouldn’t work…’ over and over in my head, but I was dead wrong. By taking the focus off of the real man and tapping into how Williams feels about himself, it breaks the biopic chains and we empathize with him from beginning to end.
“That’s such a testament to Jonno Davies,” he says. “He did such a deep dive into Robbie’s mannerisms that make Robbie Robbie, and even though it’s Robbie’s singing voice on the songs, Jonno’s performance is spectacular. His mimicking the way that Robbie performs, how he moves–even down to how he holds the mic. His little nuanced expressions that he does that are quintessentially Robbie are all there to the point where Robbie was blown away by it when he watched it. Credit also goes to Wētā [FX] and the artists that really honored that performance with how they translated it in such a breathtaking way. Before Jonno laid bare in front of the camera like they, these artists really went to such a high level of respect fot the performance through the digital detail.”
When Williams is deepest into his drug and alcohol abuse, we feel like we are standing with him–almost like we are at all the same parties and all the post-show bashes. We witness ever hit, every sip of booze. You think it will die down sooner, but then Gracy ratchets it up further like he’s turning the dial up on a huge speaker. He takes the excess to a breaking point and then he climbs even higher. The director insisted on never letting up to plunk us down into Williams’ experience.
“I had to fight for the length of that,” Gracey admits. “When you watch it, you might think that it’s too much, but it’s meant to be too much. It’s excessive. You want the audience screaming at the screen for him to stop–enough already. When you see someone doing such things to themselves, that’s what you might say to them, so there’s honesty in that excessiveness. Unless you feel like yelling that out to the screen, it’s not enough, and when he finally does stop, you should feel that relief. I wanted you to feel like you were engaging at the level that he is engaging, and his excessiveness is painful to watch. It’s at the expense of everyhing he’s ever wanted.”
The “Rock DJ” performance is the highest high you will feel in a theater this year. I love how he films musical sequences in that he likes a lot of people in the frame, and he keeps the camera back to show us their entire bodies smashing through the choreography. You see movement from the fingertips down to the point of a (monkeyed) toe. Not only does my favorite Williams’ tune flood the ears, but it’s cheeky and impish (watch out for those rogue soccer balls, people) as Williams’ enthusiasm officially boils over. Gracey makes the case for spectacle.
“The key was sketching it out,” he says. “We went down to Regent Street in the middle of the night and danced it out and filmed it on our iPhones. It was three in the morning, and there were drunk people screaming at us. We went back and cut it together, and we would pick out moments where we thought we could make it more enjoyable. We’d lock in certain bars and when a moment didn’t feel right, we’d work it out. Ashley [Wallen] and his assistant, Jenny [Griffin], just went at it time and time again. They went into the studio with dancers, and then they would send me a whole bunch of new ideas. Once we got something in video form that we were feeling strong about, we’d motion capture the routines and put them into the computer. That way we could see what it looks like when you at a hundred people at the end and then two hundred and then five hundred because, then, you are around the corner of the bend. There’s no digital people in that final shot–it goes on forever.
Spectacle has a hard time these days, because there’s so much digital that we are all a bit numb to whether it’s 200 people or 2000. At a certain point, you just naturally disconnect, so that’s why we went to the trouble of the first 2000 people at Nebworth–they’re all real. It was worth it. One hundred percent worth it. For Jonno, up there on stage, he felt like a rock god.”
Williams calls himsel a ‘narcissistic, punchable, shit-eating twat’ at the beginning of Better Man. That’s not exactly the stance most people take when they a film is being made about them, but what does Williams have to lose? To see an artist willing to put their darkest moments on display is admirable, but Gracey’s handling of the pop icon’s life story takes enormous trust and guts.
“Rob allowed a film to represent him in his highs and lows, and, in your lows, they’re not particularly things you want the whole world to know about,” Gracey says. “The fact that he was brave enough to go, ‘I come off quite unlikable in this scene and that scene…and that scene and that scene…do not water it down.’ I actually think that’s one of the things, aside from the monkey, that sets this apart from other musical biopics, in a very big way. These kinds of films tend to get watered down, because they either want to protect the legacy of the artist that is no longer with us or they don’t want to be showing the person not coming off well. It does mean for an audience that you there and you know certain things aren’t true. The whold world knows that that’s not true. Someone cme up with a list of all the things that have been said about Rob in public and on social media, and ‘punchable’ was one that made me laugh immediately.”
Better Man opens in select theater on Christmas Day before going wide on January 10.
