Better Man (2024)

Better Man arrives as a satirical jukebox musical in which Robbie Williams, the British pop singer, is portrayed as an anthropomorphic chimpanzee, a conceit drawn from his own description of himself as a performing monkey. Nobody in the film remarks upon this. It is a stylistic decision, not a statement, and the picture is better for it. Michael Gracey directs three decades of chart success, addiction, and family grievance with genuine visual ambition, including a Regent Street dance number involving five hundred performers and a Knebworth sequence intercut with archival footage. The result is a strange, sincere, and financially catastrophic piece of work.

The film's engagement with contemporary social concerns is glancing at best. Take That's early, unprofitable residency in gay clubs is treated as a brief historical beat, a moment of acceptance before the machinery of fame closes in. Nicole Appleton's storyline includes a manager pressuring her toward terminating a pregnancy, which lands as one more entry in the film's catalog of industry cruelty, not as a thesis about women's autonomy. The mental health material is more sustained: depression, cocaine, self-harm, and a chorus of inner critics who eventually manifest as a mob for the Knebworth finale. This is framed as illness and arrested development, which is honest, though it stops short of any clinical or neurological framing. Racial consciousness, environmental concern, and body image are absent entirely, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

There is a mild therapeutic message in the rehab confession, an admission that fame stunted his growth, and the closing reconciliation with his father. It is delivered with a light touch, subordinate to the spectacle. We are left with a well-crafted curiosity that wears its progressive sensibilities loosely, like a jacket borrowed for a single evening.