Better Man isn’t a music biopic — it’s a must-see fantasy spectacular

For American audiences, no less than, the film musical Higher Man is a reasonably onerous promote. It’s an odd-sounding challenge — a music biopic with the leading man replaced by a CG chimp, constructed across the profession of a world famous person and former boy-band member who’s never really broken through in the States. Individuals don’t share the remainder of the world’s fascination with pop singer Robbie Williams, despite his 14 chart-topping albums, common presence in U.Okay. tabloids, and cheeky, viral-friendly music videos. (Observe: 107 million views on that video alone, and it isn’t even near his most-viewed hit, “Angels.”) So the thought of a biopic may not have any on the spot attraction for U.S. viewers, even with that “ape protagonist” gimmick including some intrigue.

However whereas the film is drawn from Williams’ life, it’s nonetheless higher to consider it as a fantasy characteristic. Director Michael Gracey beforehand turned P.T. Barnum’s profession into the rousing, ultra-popular musical movie The Biggest Showman, whereas glossing over or revising most of the reality of Barnum’s life and work. Whereas Higher Man comes nearer to the reality about Williams’ historical past, it equally plays with image and emotion over facts, notably in relation to the music. Simply as Gracey replaces Williams with an ape for a wide range of causes (extra on that in a bit), he fictionalizes and broadens his topic’s story. Extra considerably, although, he tells the story via fantasy sequences so daring, expressive, and visually startling that the consequences dominate the film.

Actor Jonno Davies performs Williams all through the film for mo-cap functions, as he grows up as a swaggering, attention-hungry showoff in a tense working-class family. He will get his first shot of nationwide fame as a youngster, when producer Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) picks him for manufactured boy band Take That, which rockets to large success. (Time later described the fandom across the band as “the 90s’ version of Beatlemania.”)

The standard behind-the-scenes drama follows: melancholy, substance abuse, conceitedness and alienation, a bottoming-out, a restoration and revival. However the primary beats don’t matter as a lot as the best way Gracey depicts them, via bravura sequences the place Williams and his cohorts journey via a spinning, mutating fantasy model of London’s Regent Avenue, or with zombie-like hordes of paparazzi attacking Williams underwater, in a set-piece straight out of Aquaman’s Trench fight.

Higher Man is overtly constructed extra round Williams’ emotional expertise of his life than round a sober reconstruction of its occasions: Presumably he by no means truly fought 110,000 variations of himself in a gory, over-the-top battle royale set to “Let Me Entertain You.” If nothing else, timeline nitpickers could escape in hives over the best way music from all through Williams’ profession is used to signify emotional moments from fully completely different components of his historical past. However the full-throated fantasy method lets Gracey escape the same old queasy questions on constancy to fact in a biopic. When your main man is an ape working in a human world, how might anybody miss that the method is extra about picture and sensation than about factual precision?

That central conceit, of Robbie Williams as a monkey-man amongst people, provides Gracey quite a lot of additional visible attraction, but it surely additionally serves as a potent metaphor. He and Williams have given completely different causes for the method: Within the movie itself, Williams simply says he’s all the time seen himself as “rather less advanced” than different individuals. In different interviews, Gracey has talked about desirous to distance the viewers from actuality in order that they’ll better accept the unreality of a musical, or about merely needing a gimmick to keep away from making simply one other samey biopic.

And forward of the film’s launch, Williams and Gracey launched a video clip the place they provide a very completely different cause: Gracey says he was impressed by Williams griping about “being dragged up on stage to carry out like a monkey,” and he determined to make that concept literal and tangible.

However other than these justifications, presenting Higher Man’s topic as a literal animal, a unique creature from everybody round him, lets Gracey lean on the themes of Williams’ alienation and sense of separation. Whether or not the barrier is his bottomless starvation for consideration, the best way he struggles with medication and alcohol whereas his boy-band friends appear bodily and emotionally more healthy, the best way his fame distances him from his household and former pals, or simply the best way he always yearns for approval from a father who’s busy chasing his personal type of fame, Williams is ready other than the world. Framing the film round probably the most self-deprecating, instinct-driven model of his self-image underlines the purpose in each shot, with out the necessity for exposition.

And there’s a harmful, animalistic facet to the ape picture as properly. Wētā FX, the consequences home behind the Planet of the Apes motion pictures, provides Williams an expressive and plausible chimp face and an in depth chimp pelt, however retains his physique language and bodily type largely human. Nonetheless, there’s an atavistic hazard to Williams’ indignant or fearful moments on the display screen, as he beats his chest or bares his fangs. In these moments, he feels much more harmful to these round him, and much much less in management, than any human character.

All of that, plus the ambitiously wild musical sequences, leaves Higher Man as a spectacle film worthy of sharing multiplexes and audiences with Wicked. It’s seemingly designed extra for followers of immersive, Wētā-centric fantasy worlds just like the Planet of the Apes or Lord of the Rings motion pictures than it’s geared toward followers of pop music historical past — and even of Williams himself. (Netflix has a four-part documentary on Williams’ life and career for these searching for a extra factually pushed method.) By the top, viewers could also be curious to be taught extra about Williams as a performer and persona, or to dig deeper into his discography.

However the Higher Man expertise is extra akin to watching a standout Bollywood musical or a Baz Luhrmann spectacular like Moulin Rouge! than to watching an episode of Behind the Music. Most musicals translate emotion into music. This one takes {that a} step additional, translating emotion right into a daring central gimmick. It’s experimental and explosive. Even for these with no funding in Williams’ work or earlier information of his profession, it’s definitely worth the watch simply to see how Gracey fills the display screen with vitality and verve, with mesmerizing staging designed to overwhelm the viewers’s senses and be certain that they stroll out singing.

Higher Man is in theaters now.