February 2015. The Mojave Desert is dark and still. Two men in a lime-green camper van huddle around the soft glow of a portable DVD player, staring at its screen dispassionately. The desert’s terrible, ancient silence is suddenly pierced by the sound of Adam Sandler burp-snarting. The men do not react. This is the 51st time they have watched Grown Ups 2 (2013) in as many weeks.
Why do we repeat ourselves? For Kiwi comedians Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery, the point of watching, ad nauseum, the universally-reviled sequel to the merely widely-reviled 2010 comedy in which Sandler and four of his friends go to a lake house was to render it legible. If the attempt (forever ensnared in the amber of their podcast about the experience, The Worst Idea of All Time) didn’t kill them both, their year of living dangerously might have, just maybe, induced some kind of gnostic state and shaken loose—from the text, from themselves—some unassailable truth. A byproduct of repetition is a kind of semantic drift, which has a weathering effect on the work in question, catalyzing a mortification process that strips back layers of meaning until only the pure symbol is left. And in that symbol, transcendence. Jean Baudrillard, who spent a career thinking about what happens to meaning when it gets reproduced past the point of recognition, would have appreciated the method, if not the material.
The other reason is that, frankly, it’s a really good bit. It is a pleasure—one of life’s greatest—to take something stupid deadly seriously. Imagine gathering once a year, forever, to watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (as in another podcast, Til Death Do Us Blart), or playing “The Boys Are Back in Town” on a bar jukebox until you get kicked out. If the thought of this inspires revulsion in you, then you and I must part ways in this yellow wood, and I’ll wish you good luck on the road ahead, dull and flat though it may be. But if it at all intrigues or appeals to you, if it piques your curiosity or makes your sense of adventure quicken, then I have an invitation for you.
This, in so many words, is how I spent a year pitching friends, family, and anyone at parties who made the mistake of speaking to me for more than 90 seconds on watching Better Man (2024) with me. In February 2025, a friend I’ll call Betty and I realized that we had both, separately, not just watched but already rewatched Better Man, which had only just been widely released a few weeks prior. We decided to keep it up.
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By all rights, Better Man—the big-budget, R-rated musical biopic in which Robbie Williams, human pop star, isan anthropomorphic CGI chimpanzee (played by Jonno Davies, human actor, in a motion-capture suit)—should not exist. Williams was probably always destined to get the biopic treatment: on his way to selling an estimated 75 million records, Williams was born in “the arse-end of the north of England,” he sang, he danced, he was abandoned by his father, he joined a boy band, he did cocaine, he went solo, he did more cocaine and had to stop, he self-actualized, and he forgave his father. Roll credits. Standard, even jejune, fodder for a paint-by-numbers outing that might briefly sizzle overseas before landing with a plop, consigning itself to the shelf with the other formulaic musician biopics of the last two decades. There was, however, a complicating factor. Williams has long had an uneasy relationship with the United States, which is a polite way of saying that his otherwise near-universal appeal stops dead somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, repelled by some invisible force field. He lived in Los Angeles for a time and took umbrage with the fact that paparazzi couldn’t place him. (“Ronnie?”) He performed a residency in Las Vegas and begged his crowds, only half-jokingly, to tell their friends about him. As far back as 2002, his anxieties about translating stateside were on full display, as he crooned in the facetious pop-ballad “I Will Talk and Hollywood Will Listen”: “Mister Spielberg, look what you’re miss-sseng.”
But to break through—to really “take America,” as a music magazine once taunted him—the usual formula was not going to cut it. Something stranger would be required. Enter the monkey, courtesy of director Michael Gracey (the twisted mind behind The Greatest Showman) and Wētā FX (the New Zealand visual effects company that built Caesar’s primate army in the Planet of the Apes reboot series). There was, of course, immediate reason to be suspicious; Williams would be heavily involved with the film from the jump, executive producing as well as providing voiceover narration, some vocals, and even the final scene’s mo-cap. And when a pop star muscles into the captain’s chair on their own biopic, the results often tend toward the hagiographic. (Recall, if you dare, the discourse around Brian May and Roger Taylor’s decision to sanitize Freddie Mercury and his story in the name of “safeguarding” his—read: their—image.)
The monkey, as Williams himself refers to him, originated from an early conversation between director and subject about “spirit animals.” Williams says he initially suggested a lion, striving to project confidence and self-worth. When Gracey demurred, he tried again, swinging to a more honest branch: “… Monkey?” The rest, as they say, is Better Man. His simian appearance is never diegetically addressed, and the logic that governs the monkey’s existence is wobbly at best, such as when he bleaches all of the fur on his body to match his real-life counterpart’s 1995 peroxide era, but only shaves the top of his head when giving himself his requisite sobriety buzzcut. But Williams’ narrator endeavors to explain at the beginning of the film that he’s showing the audience “how I really see myself.” Later, sitting in a rehab sharing circle, taking stock of the toll fame and addiction have had on him, the monkey refers to himself as an “unevolved” creature. Williams’ other self (his fursona?) seems to have been living at the base of his consciousness for as long as he’s been in the public eye. The “cheeky” member of his ‘90s-era boy band, Take That, Williams metamorphosed into an early-aughts solo artist who put out a single called “Me and My Monkey” in order to narrativize his prodigious habit for alcohol and drugs.1 After he got sober, Williams would sometimes refer to those years as his “performing monkey” period.
And yet, the monkey is also, more cynically, a blatant marketing gimmick. “We needed to have a unique selling point,” Williams admitted in the same interview in which he recounts the conversation with Gracey. This was especially true for the American audiences who might otherwise have been unfamiliar with Williams and his life story. (“That’s what the monkey is for!” blares one meme making fun of America’s befuddlement.) With such an audacious formal gambit, Better Man was his chance to show Tinseltown—and the rest of America—exactly what he was about. “If you can’t convince them, then you must confuse them,” he sings in a B-side off his latest album, Britpop, released just six days after Better Man’s wide release.
It did not work. The movie’s box-office failure was “abject and crushing,” an “extinction-level” event in every conceivable way (both domestic and international), particularly in light of its $110 million budget and Paramount’s $25 million pickup fee. This, despite critical responses that ran the gamut from pleasantly surprised to outright laudatory. The monkey’s rendering was not just serviceable, but great? The story not just adequate, but moving? The movie’s world constructed not just with bombast, but with aplomb and care?
The movie would chug along capably enough even if it weren’t a jukebox musical, but it is particularly in those musical interludes and its montages—which have become a signature element of Gracey’s maximalist style, a fact wholly unsurprising once you know that the perpetually be-beanied filmmaker cut his teeth at the foot of Baz Luhrmann during post-production on Moulin Rouge! (2001)—that it truly takes flight. The camera swoops in and around the actors, zeroing in on Davies, whose brutal physicality extends to every element of the Williams experience: the loose-hipped strut, the mockney leer, the berserk (bananas?) oscillation between cocky-lad showman and needy pub bore. Gracey stages these sequences like athletic events. Having just been assured of Take That’s signing with a major label, Davies-as-Williams vaults across Regent Street, slinging himself through crowds with his bandmates on pogo sticks, and flails across the frame with the manic grace of a young man trying to outrun his own ego. The choreography has the ecstatic momentum of a pop concert and the faintly panicked energy of a nervous breakdown. What results is less a portrait of Williams at a particular moment in his youth than a kinetic argument about who he is as an artist—the idea that charisma, at scale, is simply another form of violence applied to the body, one that must be repeated nightly until it finally gives out. In other words, it’s rather like attending a Robbie Williams concert, if only one can be convinced to enter the stadium.
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Betty and I set out to scalp as many tickets to that experience as possible. Drawing the uninitiated masses in with the promise of a monkey doing heroin, each month we put an increasing number of friends in front of Williams, who has always—man or monkey—shifted in the presence of a crowd. He becomes something closer to what the ancient Greeks referred to as a psychopomp, a dragger of souls, ascending to the sublime and hauling his public towards a shared emotional crescendo. That’s always been the great big joke of Williams; that beneath the gobshite philosopher, the smart-arsed lad who once referred to close observation of the birth of his first child as akin to watching his favorite pub burn down, sits one of the great live entertainers of the modern pop era. He’s a self-proclaimed “swear-y Sinatra with tattoos” who prowls the stage like he’s trying to sell every seat in the house a slightly different version of the same idea.
The stakes of failing to make that sale, as Better Man frames them, are existential. If he doesn’t, “they’ll see that I’m ugly, I’m stupid, I’m untalented, I’m not good at anything,” Williams’ narrator frets as his 9-year-old self nears meltdown levels of anxiety while awaiting his entrance in a children’s production of The Pirates of Penzance. His child-chimp self swings onstage and hams it up, much to the delight of the audience, but his own joy fades quickly when he realizes his father has forsaken his performance for his own moment in the sun, at an open mic night down at the local pub. The shattering awareness of this is enough to trigger both the first appearance of Williams’ ferocious inner demons—represented, literally, as his various monkey selves, judging him as “useless” and “a disgrace” from the crowd—and the first musical number of the movie, born out of the primal wound of his father’s abandonment.
“Wait, this is a musical?” was a question we occasionally received from the uninitiated at this point. Those hapless virgins arrived to the screenings, as a rule, in good humor, willing at least to be ironically complicit in whatever this was. (Over the course of the year, a self-selecting group of repeat viewers emerged, dubbing themselves, unfortunately, the Better Men.) Any apprehension, such as it was, tended to manifest as bemused uncertainty rather than active resistance: polite questions (“But why a monkey?”), vague familiarity with “Angels,” the occasional involuntary shriek at the film’s opening shot—an extreme close-up of the young chimp Robbie grinning down the barrel of the camera like a small, unsettling god. Again and again, though, it was around the half-hour mark that the room began to give itself over. That’s when, newly signed, newly certain of everything, Williams and the Take That boys burst out onto the street like champagne from a shaken bottle, scattering commuters and tourists as the choreography swells across the pavement. For a glorious, joyful three minutes and 42 seconds, “Rock DJ” plays out. Five hundred real extras swarm Regent Street. The camera begins crowd-surfing, always returning to place Williams at the eye of the storm. The propulsive energy builds until both sides of the screen—the boulevard and the bleachers—are vibrating at the same frequency. The sequence invariably left the room winded, making the noises you make when something has gotten further inside you than you intended to let it.
Better Man’s manifold fracturing effect serves to rupture our understanding of what constitutes a musical biopic. The genre, which has metastasized over the last decade into an arms race of mythmaking and ego maintenance, typically operates as a kind of hyperreality machine, manufacturing the sensation of authenticity through sheer force of recipe. These are films in which actors are encouraged to dissolve into their subjects until we are meant to believe, against our better judgment, that Rami Malek simply is Freddie Mercury, or that the audience has at last been granted access to the hidden ‘truth’ of Bob Dylan rather than the public construction. The result is a parade of trailer-ready confessions about identity—“People don’t pay to see Reginald Dwight. They pay to see ELTON JOHN!” or “I do know who you are / Well, that makes one of us”—and films about the crisis of authenticity that remain blissfully unaware of their own participation in it, particularly when their subjects are eagerly complicit in their construction. Better Man, to be fair, has its share of corny trailer lines: “Do I look like a popstar to you?” “I don’t want to be a nobody!” “You give a fuck what everyone thinks, Rob. That’s all you give a fuck about.” But, to its credit, it simultaneously recognizes the trap and swerves so hard in the other direction it upends the fruit cart entirely.
For one thing, Williams is willing to forgo sanctification in favor of self-annihilation. He is—has always been—ready to literally flay himself alive for our viewing pleasure. In Better Man, that takes the form of the movie’s most wretched sequence, in which Robbie ignores a call from his mother (about his dying grandmother, we later learn) to do heroin in his bathroom, the camera leering at him as he cooks up a shot, cutting away between each step to show his devastated wife simultaneously discovering evidence of his infidelity on the other side of the door. But it is only in descending to these dark but deeply human levels—having necessarily first resurrected himself in debased and depraved monkey-avatar form—that he can re-present to us the crisis that his younger years actually were.
And by replacing Williams with a CGI monkey, it stops pretending that the ‘real’ Robbie can be recovered at all. The simulation doesn’t just replace the authentic self; it reveals that there was never an unmediated self to replace. The movie pierces the veil from the first frame, a terrifying close-up of the young chimp Robbie beaming unnervingly down the barrel of the camera, waiting to be stuck in goal for five-a-side, which both orients and disorients the viewer. It admits the simulation and lets the whole thing collapse inward like a carnival mirror, clearing room for the revelation that even Williams’ name is a construct, a reviled moniker chosen for him by Take That’s enterprising manager, Nigel Martin-Smith. “I fucking hated the name ‘Robbie,’ but it was the single best thing Nigel did for me,” Williams recounts in voiceover. “Robbie became a character. Something I could hide behind.” With that out in the open, the real fun can begin. Or, as Baudrillard once put it: “The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” In other words, if you’re going to make a biopic in the twenty-first century, you might as well get into some monkey business.
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For all its alienation tactics, Better Man also quietly works to collapse the chasm between Robert and Robbie, the conjunction between the man and the monkey. To begin with, Gracey made the (no doubt costly) decision to “scan” Williams’ eyeballs for use in rendering his ape alter ego, explaining that when we, the audience, “look at the monkey’s eyes, it’s actually one-for-one Rob’s eyes.” Williams’ eyes, a grey-green flecked with gold, are arresting, particularly when they flick open in extreme close-up. The synthetic image—the avatar—includes tiny biometric reminders of the real human presence buried inside the spectacle, serving as a medium of sincerity for the message. Those are Williams’ real eyes you’re staring into; why shouldn’t this be his real story? The real discreetly suffuses the blatantly artificial from there on; part of the film’s climactic Knebworth sequence, just before Williams literally slays hundreds of his demons in a battle-royale bloodbath while singing “Let Me Entertain You,” was constructed out of archival footage of the real concert. And it is that medieval slaughterfest that feels far truer to the man on the verge of what he later called a “massive mental breakdown” than the one who told the record-breaking crowd, as Williams really did, that he was “tonight, quite possibly, the happiest man on the planet.”
What’s more, the protective epidermis of the digital anthropomorphized self may not be as insulating as it first may seem. Asked by Graham Norton whether it was “easier” to watch the worst horrors of his life play out onscreen “when it’s a monkey,” Williams barely hesitated before replying, “Not really, no.” It may be a bipedal chimpanzee driving a car at breakneck speed down a country road (“Come Undone”), spinning Nicole Appleton around a yacht (“She’s the One”), and standing on frozen lake ice on his country estate (“Better Man”), but the images still correspond to real coordinates in Williams’ biography: a near-breakdown, an abortion, a suicide attempt. The symbols are cartoonish; the feelings they encode are not. The monkey suit does not spare him the embarrassment of self-recognition. It merely renders that recognition legible to us. Which is, perhaps, why Better Man works so strangely well when experienced as ritual rather than as content. The movie is, among other things, about a man who became a tribute act to himself. Repetition takes it on tour, turning the fetish inside out.
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Somewhere around the middle stretch of Project Better Man, the screenings stopped functioning as viewings in the traditional sense and began operating more like gatherings—loosely structured civic events organized around a shared bit. We were no longer watching Better Man; we were watching the idea of Better Man, and watching ourselves watch it, like a bunch of amateur phenomenologists (primatologists?) with a popcorn bucket between us. Familiar beats and favorite lines became liturgy. The monkey gets a hand job in public; someone would inevitably shout something obscene; the Regent Street sequence would see the energy in the room surge, briefly, to eleven. The film’s working title, Apes Together Strong, became just as much a mantra as yet another reference to Planet of the Apes.
The project’s natural endpoint arrived in December, when the bit reached its apotheosis in a small, rentable theater in Brooklyn. A modest crowd assembled. Gracey, the director, had taped a gently baffled video introduction after someone (hi!) emailed his publicist. The word “unhinged” was used at least once, and indeed, for the next 135 minutes, the energy in that little theater touched the psychic scale of Knebworth, circa 2003. The crowd was smaller, the star digital, the transcendence not just provisional but provincial. But the principle held. If celebrity is a machine for producing artificial intimacy at stadium scale, then Better Man—and the strange communal experiment it inspired—suggests that the reverse may also be true: that repetition, applied with sufficient sincerity to even the most deranged possible version of a thing, is itself a mode of meaning-making. That you can watch your way, collectively, into something real. Apes together strong.
- Although lyrically Williams’ track has more in common with Katy Perry’s “Waking Up in Vegas,” it’s worth noting that the title of the song is likely a reference to the 1968 Beatles number “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey.” Hours before his murder, John Lennon told an interviewer the song was about a rock star’s inability to “be absolutely oneself in public,” because the fact of being watched demands “some kind of defense.”