Better Man

Better Man is the most creatively audacious biopic in recent memory and also one of the most commercially disastrous. Michael Gracey's decision to portray Robbie Williams as a CGI chimpanzee throughout the entire film is either a stroke of genius or a fatal miscalculation depending on whether you're measuring artistic ambition or box office returns. The film earned just $11 million against a reported $110 million budget, making it one of the biggest flops of 2024. It was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 97th Academy Awards, a technical acknowledgment that the monkey actually works on screen even if audiences couldn't be convinced to show up.

The conceit reportedly originated with Williams himself, who has spent decades describing himself in interviews as feeling like a performing monkey, less than human, a creature trained to entertain. Gracey takes this metaphor and makes it literal. The result is a film where a photo-realistic CGI ape performs Take That choreography, snorts cocaine off nightclub tables, has screaming matches with his absent father, and performs 'Angels' to a stadium of 80,000 people at Knebworth. It should be ridiculous. Much of the time, it is not.

The film follows Williams from his childhood in Stoke-on-Trent through his time in Take That, his bitter exit from the group, his solo career explosion, his descent into addiction and depression, and his eventual recovery. The emotional arc is familiar from a hundred biopics, but the monkey changes everything. When Williams-as-chimp sits alone in a massive empty house, surrounded by bottles and pills, the anthropomorphic distance creates an unexpected intimacy. You can see the pain without the vanity of a human actor playing at suffering. The artifice paradoxically creates more honesty.

The musical sequences are Gracey's strongest contribution. A fantasy dance number through the streets of London set to 'Rock DJ' is genuinely thrilling. The Knebworth concert recreation is staggering in its scale and emotional punch. Gracey brings the same maximalist spectacle that made The Greatest Showman a phenomenon, and when the music is playing, Better Man soars.

For VirtueVigil's audience, this is a genuine MIXED verdict. The film contains progressive elements - mental health destigmatization, some mild critiques of toxic masculinity, a sympathetic portrayal of vulnerability in a hypermasculine entertainment industry. But it also contains strongly traditional elements - the centrality of father-son relationships, the consequences of abandoning family and faith in pursuit of fame, the narrative arc of redemption through personal responsibility rather than systemic change. The film does not push any political agenda. Its concerns are personal, not ideological.

Better Man is a film about a man who felt like an animal and was brave enough to show the audience exactly that. Whether that bravery was commercially suicidal is another question entirely.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Mental Health Destigmatization	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Critique of Toxic Masculinity / Performance Pressure	2	High	Moderate	1.4
Entertainment Industry Critique	2	High	Moderate	1.4
TOTAL WOKE				4.9

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Father-Son Relationship / Absent Father Wound	5	High	High	6.3
Personal Responsibility / Consequences of Self-Destruction	3	High	High	3.8
Working-Class Roots / Community Authenticity	2	High	Low	0.7
Redemption Through Self-Knowledge	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				12.9

Score Margin: +2 TRAD