The Ape Star

The climactic battle in Better Man is a frenzy
of ape-on-ape violence. This is clearly fantasy.
Image via YouTube.

In the climactic moment of Better Man, an anthropomorphic chimpanzee named Robbie Williams takes the stage at the Knebworth Festival in front of 125,000 fans to sing his pop anthem, “Let Me Entertain You.” Nearing the end of the song, he spots in the audience dozens — then hundreds — of younger and angrier chimpanzee versions of himself. Leaping into the crowd, he begins fighting them one-by-one, with each showdown getting bloodier and more outlandish.

With the leaping chimpanzees, the soaring camera work, and the colourful cinematography, it is as if the Battle of Isengard had been set on the Planet of the Apes and directed by Speed-Racer-era Wachowskis.

So let us be perfectly clear about this point: any movie featuring a battle royale between thousands of anthropomorphic apes is fantastical enough to be considered for a Hugo Award. Whether or not Better Man is a “pure” fantasy movie, it is at the very least a form of magical realism.

It’s also possibly the most audacious — and beautiful — science fiction or fantasy movie released in 2024.

Directed by Greatest Showman auteur Michael Gracey, the movie chronicles the rise of real-world, non-chimpanzee, UK superstar Robbie Williams, his feud with the boy band that launched his career, and his struggles with addiction. These are all the standard narrative beats of a Hollywood music biopic, but Better Man is elevated by the unusual approach to the subject (to whit the motion-capture ape), the panache with which the movie has been directed, and Williams’ sardonic voice.

The real-world non-chimpanzee Robbie Williams
is known for his self-serious dignity.
(Image via RobbieWilliams.com)

Unfortunately, the movie woefully underperformed at the box office — earning only $20 million on a budget that exceeded $110 million. Perhaps it struggled in cinemas because Americans have never really understood Robbie Williams, something explored in the recent Netflix documentary about his life … but not in this film. Americans like their bragaddocio unmitigated; every time Williams offers a bombastic line, he undermines it with a joke. His is a quintessentially British voice that did not appeal to enough people in the USA.

The film’s inability to reach a wider audience is a shame, because by wrapping its narrative in special effects and fantasy, the story becomes more universal. It makes no pretense of being an entirely true and factual depiction of Robbie Williams’ life. To quote Williams himself: “You don’t want the truth. Truth is boring.” This is a fantasy inspired by mostly inaccurate tabloid stories about a pop star. The viewer isn’t being offered the definitive biography of a person, but rather a fable about a dancing primate.

And this makes Better Man better cinema — and more interesting SFF. The movie is full of metaphor and surreal asides in which the chimpanzee Williams is constantly confronted by his personal demons in the guise of past versions of himself.

Williams has spoken about his cinematic simian alter-ego, explaining that he’s often described as “just a performing monkey,” that he’s “less evolved,” and that “fame makes monkeys of us all.” The effect was created by the special effects house Weta, the company that created Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in Planet of the Apes — they should get a lot of credit for making this central metaphor work, imbuing the animation with pathos while also maintaining its otherness.

One of the central relationships in the movie
is between chimpanzee Robbie and his
grandmother played by Alison Steadman.
(Image via Entertainment Weekly)

The cast is filled with scene-stealing turns by actors who are not yet household names. In the leading motion-capture performance, Jonno Davies manages to imbue the role with pathos and sincerity, while never downplaying the darker places to which the narrative takes him. Alison Steadman is simply superb as Betty Williams, Robbie’s grandmother. The movie’s most dislikeable character, Nigel Martin-Smith, is played with aplomb by Damon Herriman.

But the biggest star of the show is the cinematographer Erik Wilson, who offers infectiously joyful camera work during dance numbers that recall Golden Age movie musicals cranked up to 11 by modern technology. The “Rock DJ” scene in Oxford Circus is a stand-out.

Even describing just the fantastic elements of the movie fails to highlight just how bloody weird the film is. For one thing, Robbie Williams is much younger than you would expect for the subject of a valedictory movie like this; with the exception of movies about stars who died far too young (La Bamba was made when Ritchie Vallens would have been 46, Notorious was made when The Notorious B.I.G. would have been 35, The Doors was made when Jim Morrison would have been 48), the only example of a major Hollywood biopic about a living star as young as Robbie Williams is the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter (Lynne was 48 in 1980 when the movie was released). Williams' most recent studio album is barely five years old, and topped the album charts in the UK, Australia, and Ireland. Moreover, the movie skips some of Robbie Williams’ biggest hits. Millennium, Something Stupid, Strong, and Kids are absent.

Speculative fiction — and the Hugo Awards — can and have embraced off-board picks in the past. Better Man was never marketed as fantasy, but it clearly fits any reasonable definition of genre cinema … and it is among the most bonkers, surreal, and beautiful movies of 2024. Seriously consider giving it a Hugo Award nomination.