General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

Better Man (2024 film)

Better Man is a 2024 musical biographical drama directed by Michael Gracey that portrays the life of British pop star Robbie Williams, represented throughout the film by a realistically animated CGI chimpanzee alongside the human cast.¹ The film follows Williams from his childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, through his years as the youngest member of the boyband Take That, to his record-breaking solo career, while depicting his struggles with mental health and addiction.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director	Michael Gracey, director of The Greatest Showman²
Central conceit	Williams is represented by a CGI chimp; Jonno Davies provides the motion capture and speaking voice, and Williams narrates¹^•³
Running time / rating	135 minutes; rated R by the MPA for drug use, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity, and some violent content; MA 15+ in Australia³^•¹
Release	US limited release December 25, 2024, wide release January 10, 2025; UK and Ireland from December 26, 2024⁴^•⁵
Country of origin	United States, Australia, China, UK, and France¹
Box office	Worldwide $22,549,151, of which $1,983,648 (8.8%) came from the domestic market⁶
Critical reception	Metascore 77 ("Generally Favorable") from 42 critic reviews, 88% positive⁷
Awards	14 wins and 47 nominations, including AACTA Awards for Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Lead Actor, and an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects⁸

Spoilers

Premise and structure

The film is based on Williams's own story, described by Paramount as his meteoric rise, dramatic fall, and remarkable resurgence, and is told from Williams's perspective with his narration.² It opens with his working-class childhood in Stoke-on-Trent, under the shadow of his crooning father, and proceeds through his unhappy years in Take That, the break from the band, a relationship with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton, and his solo career, culminating in a performance of "My Way" at the Royal Albert Hall.⁵^•⁹

The chimp device. Williams had described himself in interviews as feeling like a performing monkey, and director Michael Gracey treated that comment as the key to Williams's conflicted relationship with celebrity and his compulsion to perform.¹⁰^•¹¹ Williams also appears in the cast credits, and his own catalog supplies the music, including songs such as "Let Me Entertain You" and "Angels" from his 1997 album Life Thru a Lens.⁷^•¹²

Production

Gracey, an Australian filmmaker who began his career as an animator, commercials director, and visual effects designer, approached major studios with the concept of a Robbie Williams biopic featuring a CGI chimp as its central character and was met with a healthy degree of skepticism.¹³^•¹⁴ The film was shot in Australia; it was the first production to use Docklands Studios Melbourne's Sound Stage 6, with VicScreen among the production companies.¹^•¹⁴ The screenplay is credited to Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, and Michael Gracey, and the producers are Paul Currie, Jules Daly, Gracey, Coco Xiaolu Ma, and Craig McMahon.¹^•⁵

The film premiered at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival and screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival before its commercial release.¹⁵^•¹⁶ Its Australian premiere took place at a red-carpet screening in Melbourne in December 2024, and in early 2025 Williams gave a free concert to 10,000 fans at Federation Square to celebrate the cinema release.¹⁴

Reception and awards

Critics broadly responded well. The film's Metacritic score of 77 rests on 42 reviews, of which 37 were positive and 5 mixed.⁷ Time Out awarded five stars, with critic Kaleem Aftab, a film critic and festival director, calling the chimp casting one of the most inspired bits of casting of the year and the film fun, bombastic, brilliantly choreographed, and totally enthralling.⁵ Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian made it his film of the week, reading it as a candid look at the destructive force of envy in Williams's career while questioning the choice of a CGI chimpanzee.⁹ A second Guardian review, by Wendy Ide, judged that the synthetic ape device transforms what would otherwise be a routine rock biopic, infusing the story with humor, mischief, and unpredictability.¹⁰

Box office. The film earned $22,549,151 worldwide, of which $1,983,648 came from the domestic United States market, where Williams never gained the traction he enjoys in Britain.⁶^•³ The United Kingdom was the largest single market at $7,846,673, followed by Australia at $3,309,947 and Mexico at $1,934,692.⁶

Awards recognition concentrated in Australia. At the 2025 AACTA Awards the film won Best Film, Best Direction in Film, Best Lead Actor in Film for Jonno Davies, and Best Supporting Actor in Film for Damon Herriman, and it also won the AACTA International Awards for Best Film and Best Direction.⁸ Overall the film recorded 14 wins and 47 nominations, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for Luke Millar, David Clayton, Keith Herft, and Peter Stubbs, and a Film Critics Circle of Australia award for Best Supporting Actor for Herriman.⁸

Context

The chimp conceit places Better Man in the company of other recent biopics that replace the traditional actor-as-lookalike format with something stranger; reviewers compared it to Piece by Piece, the 2024 Pharrell Williams biopic told in Lego animation.¹⁰^•¹⁷ It also arrived amid a run of lauded music biopics that reviewers measured it against, including Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody, with Time Out placing Better Man ahead of both.⁵ The film underscores a paradox in Williams's career, which has produced 14 UK number-one singles and the third-most UK number-one albums of any musician, behind only The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, yet has never found a comparable American audience.³^•⁵

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026