Better Man

Despite the clear indicators of interventions, supported detoxification, and the depiction of group counselling, there's little doubt that we can add this to the list of things men will do rather than get therapy. Robbie Williams became famous early, and depending on where you stand on the great man theory of history at a confluence of significant changes in the music industry. More importantly to his story, at a point before significant changes in him as a person. He outlines in one of those sessions that there's a theory that you stop developing as a person at the age you become famous. Joining Take That at about 15, he describes as "stunted", but 'stunt' is a fair descriptor of Better Man.

That's in part because of its central conceit, achieving a degree of remove in an autobiopic by replacing Robbie's likeness with an ape. The 'auto' is because Robbie, Robert, "youth", provides his own voice as narrator and narratee, joined in his production credits by several others under a mixture of prosthetic makeup and digital wizardry. Technically so, Weta Workshop provided measures of each. That means that while teams were working on assets for a siege in animation The War Of The Rohirrim someone down the hall was helping with a battle at Knebworth.

That's one of several moments where film's ability to change scale and scope turns Better Man from a jukebox musical into something at once more and less personal. The lines between figurative and literal are more blurred than the action in a fight between an artist and his demons. A massive montage with almost as many costume changes as dancers brings a taste of the big top to the stretch of Regent Street between Oxford and Piccadilly Circuses.

Among the many dancers, several faces just on the right side of familiar are recognisable as his Take That team-mates. They include Damon Herriman as pop-impresario Nigel Martin Smith. Herriman may be a familiar face, he's got a list of credits long enough to defy easy synthesis, but it's possibly not an accident that he's played Charles Manson twice, once for Quentin Tarantino. Others might recognise him from his work in the sterling Mr Inbetween, which expands on the story of Ray Shoesmith first told in The Magician.

His description is one of the places where the film's metatextuality comes to the fore. Or more specifically to the four-letter word, as it's the first of I think seven times where what's commonly held to be the worst swear word in English is used. I say "worst", but it regularly appeared in place and street names for years. Better Man uses it enough to fill a map, though it's got plenty of other synonyms for routing and rooting.

Call it another stunt. I didn't expect this to have as much swearing as Kneecap, never mind more. I think it's part of an effort to achieve the gloss of something serious and adult. It's not quite following Ronald Reagan's Bedtime For Bonzo with a series of graphs that show lines rapidly changing direction during his presidency. It's more like finding a different body part near the leg to rhyme with 'dock'.

The two make for interesting comparisons. Kneecap is a directorial debut, Michael Gracey helmed a differently smashing musical in The Greatest Showman. They both take liberties, all saints, and indeed run all over the shop with their depictions of real events, drug taking, and darker elements. Using its first expletive in perhaps the third line, it ends with text and the URL for 988Lifeline. That's a project of the US-governmental Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and it's a weirdly American focus given, you know, everything else.

Among the many songs are covers, some by Sinatra and some of songs he made popular. Even the Take That songs are ones they didn't write, at least as far as I can tell. The presence of the Rat Pack in the menagerie isn't too closely examined, but runs through from Stoke-On-Trent to the Albert Hall. The sands of time might now be demolished but this is more of psyche than geography. At the very end of the credits there's a note saying "viewer discretion is advised" but even if those were the first words discretion was never on the cards.

This is startlingly confessional. To the extent that Robbie is helped to shed his burdens by several others. That's mostly Jonno Davies, not in his first film role but moving on from roles in UK TV staples like Holby and Hollyoaks. If it's his motion that's been captured he's done a tremendous job, there are countless forms of swinging here and everything that should be is caught. As the even younger Robbie(s) Carter J Murphy makes a film début and Asmara Feik adds another to her list of bold re-tellings of true stories, having been the young Maggie Kelly in the True History.

The warnings shouldn't just include language, and emotional outpourings, but strobes. The paparazzi of the era didn't yet have Spencer's blood on their hands, and have yet to show any sign of it on a conscience. The flashbulbs are blinding, catching a moment in time very specifically.

Take That were part of a wave of British cultural resurgence, but they were eclipsed critically by some acts and commercially by others. That clearly weighs more on some than others. In another of the film's slightly odd repetitions, Leo Harvey Elledge has played Liam Gallagher before, and he's one of several presences who haunt Williams, even typographically. Take that were still part of the fabric of the era, woven through with other artists, buoyed by a generational shift in buying habits and a last hurrah for record labels. The tail end of an era where music magazines made money and the charts had more meaning than lists of sausage rolls. Plenty of artists mine their trauma but revisiting these seams seems to risk collapse.

Co-written by Simon Gleeson, a star of stage including musicals, frequent Michael Gracey collaborator Oliver Cole, it does entertain. That said, I'm not sure by how much if you're not familiar with its star and subject. I did wonder a few times if this was a pitch for a theatre production, maybe something involving puppets. In the same neck of the woods as that London song and dance you can grab (but not touch) Magic Mike, go back to Back To The Future, roam with The Lion King. All three of those have features in their productions that Better Man might later borrow.

It borrows plenty itself. Trainspotting and 24 Hour Party People are literally of the era. I felt that period detail sometimes aimed more for a feeling than accuracy, especially with cars. Some of those sequences seem to borrow from George Miller's work and in terms of acceleration Gracey's involvement with Rocketman has possibly fuelled this as much as any drugs or alcohol.

There are other movies with monkeys, with flying monkeys, with battles at concerts and artists exorcising their demons on-screen. None of those have a Workington AFC away kit, or a bit of innuendo based on merchandise in the form of a nesting doll. There are other films that allude to off-screen agreements involving lawyers but none I can think of that mix references to sun-tan lotion below the waist and Hamley's. Better Man is definitely singular, undeniably personal, but perhaps not unique. There's a suspicion that watching this might leave you coming away knowing its subject slightly better than he knows himself. Except that's part of the performance, cinema is literally projection but this takes it to fresh extremes. Though its subject chooses to portray himself as an animal for those who don't bear any fondness for him the zoological parallel is perhaps a curate's egg.