Producers: Paul Currie, Michael Gracey, Coco Xiaolu Ma, Jules Daly and Craig McMahon  Director: Michael Gracey   Screenwriters: Michael Gracey, Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole   Cast: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton, Raechelle Banno, Alison Steadman, Kate Mulvany, Damon Herriman, Jake Simmance, Liam Head, Jesse Hyde, Chase Vollenweider, Frazier Hadfield, Tom Budge and Anthony Hayes     Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Grade: C+

Fairly early on in Michael Gracey’s biopic about pop singer-songwriter Robbie Williams, the director, choreographer Ashley Wallen, cinematographer Erik A. Wilson, production designer Joel Chang, costumer Cappi Ireland, editors Jeff Groth, Lee Smith and Spencer Susser, along with a large ensemble of singers and dancers, perform Wilson’s “Rock DJ.”  Supposedly set on London’s Regent Street to represent the triumphant success of Take That, the boy band that Wilson was part of from 1990 to 1995, the song wasn’t actually written until later (it was first released on one of his singles albums in 2000), but that doesn’t matter: it captures the excitement of the moment, and the number built around it, made to look like a single uninterrupted take, is fantastic—intricately constructed, exuberantly executed, brilliantly shot, and enormously entertaining.  If the rest of “Better Man” were half as good, the movie would be an absolute winner.

Unfortunately, it isn’t, following in narrative terms a pretty conventional, and awfully self-serving, trajectory of up, down, and up again, ending with Wilson becoming the better man of the title. But visually it makes one distinctly disorienting choice.  Williams doesn’t actually appear until the very end, though he narrates in voiceover throughout and sings, of course.  Until then he’s played by an actor named Jonno Davies.  But Davies is depicted as a computer-animated chimpanzee interacting with human actors.

The effect, accomplished by a team from New Zealand’s Wētā FX, is superbly done, every bit as convincing as what the firm managed in the most recent “Planet of the Apes” movies.  And after a while one gets used to it, and accepts that it’s a way of expressing Williams’ idea that he sees himself, before his late-in-life transformation, as having been less than human.  But though the point may be valid enough, over the course of two hours the means of making it feels increasingly like an affectation that loses its potency over the long haul, a stunt that runs out of steam.

And as it does so, you increasingly notice that stripped of the simian symbolism, “Better Man” isn’t much different from most movies about pop music stars.  And not appreciably better.  

It begins in the early 1980s, when young Robbie lived in a small town to the northwest of London with his parents Janet (Kate Mulvany) and Peter (Steve Pemberton), along with his loving grandma (Alison Steadman).  Peter, a would-be performer himself, teaches the kid to sing in the style of the greats like Frank Sinatra, but then abandons the family in search of a show biz career himself.  So the overarching theme will become Williams’ striving for his absent father’s approval and respect.

He auditions for a boy band, and his cheeky manner persuades creator-manager Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) to team him with Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance), Howard Donald (Liam Head), Mark Owen (Jesse Hyde) and Jason Orange (Chase Vollenweider) in Take That.  Their success leads to bad behavior and drug use, which in turn cause his dismissal from the band.  He sinks deeper into addiction but finds salvation in a relationship with singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) and a songwriting partnership with Guy Chambers (Tom Budge).  But though his solo career takes off, he breaks up with Appleton after she aborts their child and is crushed when his grandmother dies; the film portrays his emotional collapse during his Knebworth concerts of 2003 in the form of a hallucination in which his various past selves battle one another in the stands.

That convinces him to change.  He goes into rehab and becomes the proverbial better man, reconciling with Nicole and apologizing to Nate (Frazier Hadfield), the childhood friend he’d broken with, as well as the members of Take That.  He visits his grandmother’s grave and even makes his peace with Peter, whom he invites to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall to sing “My Way” with him, coming to terms with the past personas he’d earlier battled at the same time.

The script by Gracey, Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole fudges a good many details—the Royal Albert concert, for instance, occurred before Knebworth, and Peter didn’t do a duet with his son there.  But such reworkings of the record for dramatic effect are commonplace in biographical movies—if you’re interested in a documentary approach, try Joe Pearlman’s four-part Netflix series on Williams—and if the result has a clichéd and predictable arc, that’s not unusual either.

But Gracey does bring a lot of zip and cinematic pizzazz to the proceedings, albeit of that emptily flashy sort one encounters in a great many British pictures (Guy Ritchie, anyone?), and if it’s only the “Rock DJ” sequence that approaches what might be called real inspiration, the rest is energetic enough to please the audiences who embraced the director’s earlier musicals “The Greatest Showman: and “Rocketman.”  The performances are of a piece with his over-the-top style—exaggerated in the extreme—and by the close you might well think the entire thing a monstrous exercise of self-aggrandizement on Williams’ par (the chimp business even comes to seem a tactic to mitigate the grandiose redemptive arc he’s selling). 

But at least “Better Man” distinguishes itself from the usual run of pop music biographies with the monkey business, and it has that in its favor, though in the last analysis it’s not quite enough to make a movie about a guy who never really broke through in America all that compelling.