Better Man · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Alison Steadman sits in a kitchen in Stoke-on-Trent and talks to a chimpanzee. She is playing Robbie Williams' grandmother, the chimpanzee is Robbie, and she does not blink. Nobody in this film blinks. The ape is never explained, never joked about, never revealed as a device. Michael Gracey's one rule is that the world of the film simply agrees, and that agreement is the whole invention. So hold onto Steadman's face rather than the ape's. The realism here lives in the people looking at him.

What Gracey has built is what Gilles Deleuze calls a crystalline description. Ordinary film description assumes an object standing outside the shot: point a camera at Stoke and Stoke is there whether you film it or not, so the image refers to something and can be checked against it. A crystalline description composes its own object and then takes its place, leaving nothing behind it to verify. Better Man is two hours of that, aimed at one man. Williams is in the film. He narrates it, he sings it, he supplied the interior point of view. He is never once in the picture. Jonno Davies wore the capture rig and gave the body; Wētā FX built the face; the subject of the biography is assembled from parts and installed where the man should have been.

This matters because of what the genre normally promises. The modern music biopic — Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis — runs on resemblance. Its truth-claim is mimicry, and the applause is for the likeness. Behind that sits the oldest bargain in cinema, the one André Bazin described: a photograph carries a trace of whatever stood in front of the lens, so the movie image is an imprint before it is an argument. Gracey tears the bargain up in the first minute and asks you to trust him more, not less. Deleuze's name for that move is the powers of the false — not lying, and not fantasy either, but falsity used as a productive force because some things cannot be photographed and have to be forged. A self-image is one of them. Williams' claim about himself, that he has always been a performing monkey doing tricks for approval, is not a fact you can shoot. So the film manufactures it, and then refuses to wink. There is an accidental joke in the record here: the Academy pulled the film's original song, "Forbidden Road," from consideration after determining it drew too heavily on pre-existing material. A film whose entire method is the productive false, docked for insufficient originality.

That performing-monkey posture has a name too. Borrowing from Brecht, Deleuze calls the gest an attitude of the body that makes a social relation visible without anyone stating it. Normally a script has to write the theme into a scene, where someone says out loud that fame turned him into a product. Gracey never has to. The relation is carried continuously by the shape of his protagonist, in every frame, including the frames where nothing is happening. It is a genuine narrative economy: the metaphor never needs a scene because it never leaves. And notice what it exposes besides fame. Class. A Midlands kid whose only exit is entertainment, and an entertainer father who took that exit and kept going.

Then the face. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up, defined not by size but by suspension: a body whose motor function drops away so that a surface can hold a feeling before it discharges into an act. The face stops being a body part and becomes a receiving plate. Wētā builds that literally. He divides it further, and the finer term is the one that fits: a potisign is a face crossed by small movements accumulating toward a threshold, a series of micro-intensities rather than one steady expression. The whole lineage this film stands on is a machine for making potisigns. The Two Towers (2002) gave us Gollum, the first fully emotive digital character driven by one actor's capture. King Kong (2005) put that craft into tight facial close-up and asked it to carry a tragic love story. Avatar (2009) contributed the head rig that lets a performance survive translation onto a non-human face. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) brought markerless on-set capture, where micro-expression reads as interiority instead of creature spectacle. War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) proved a captured primate could headline a sombre adult drama and hold an arc in close-up. Alita: Battle Angel (2019) ran the same wager alongside. Better Man inherits all of it and moves it exactly one step: into the musical. That step is harder than it sounds. Creature work is engineered around isolated hero shots. A number needs the synthetic body inside choreography, matched to real dancers, in a crowd, under sustained moving camera, for minutes without relief.

Which is what the "Rock DJ" sequence is for. The camera travels down a crowded shopping thoroughfare in a seemingly unbroken take while an ensemble of dancers keeps accumulating around the ape at its centre. Deleuze wrote about musicals precisely for this: at a certain point the dancer stops being the source of his own movement and is taken up by a movement of world, where the individual step passes into something impersonal that carries him. The number is an argument about fame that never uses the word. He does not conquer the street. The street picks him up and moves him.

The reversal comes at Knebworth, where he is confronted by an army of alternate versions of himself and the staging turns into a battlefield. Deleuze would call this an onirosign, a dream-image: a circuit not attached to any datable memory, so it cannot be filed away as a flashback and dismissed. Earlier the world moved and carried him. Here the world is nothing but him, and it is coming to kill him. The same technology that made the crowd a lift now makes it a mob.

Underneath the spectacle runs something older and grubbier. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a cinema where a concrete setting turns out to be the crust over an originary world of appetite, and characters slide down an irreversible line toward exhaustion. Drab Stoke, then the neon of stardom, then the addiction and self-destruction the film does not soften. Deleuze said that world is populated by beast-men. Gracey makes it literal and then, unusually for the mode, permits a recovery.

One more thing the film does that Deleuze has a word for: fabulation, a subject caught in the act of legending himself. Williams narrates his own myth in his own voice while a manufactured body performs it. He is author and artefact at once.

Be honest about the limits. The skeleton is conventional — cradle to redemption, the paternal wound, needle-drops covering decades in ellipses. The invention is not in the story. It is in the body carrying it. But that is the significance, and it is not small: before this, the fully digital lead was reserved for events, for monsters, myths and wars, where its strangeness was the point. Better Man spends the most expensive tool in cinema on an ordinary man's opinion of himself, and puts it in the genre with the least tolerance for fakery, since musicals live or die on whether bodies really move together. Audiences did not come, and the film became a headline case of acclaim that would not convert. The technique arrived before the market for it. It usually does.

Watch it once for the ape. Then watch it again for the humans, and see how much of your belief they are quietly doing for you.