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BONUS EPISODE: "Better Man" (Patreon)

Published:
2025-02-25 22:43:05
Imported:
2026-06

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MUNKEE. MUNKEEEEEEE.

Anyway, Robbie Williams tried one last time to sell himself to America last year and couldn't do it yet again, even though he tried the weirdest rebrand in history -- he made himself a CGI monkey. For some reason. Some reason that is shockingly never once explained or addressed in the movie. We try to figure out why!

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Comments

Vince Whitacre

Ah yes, who can forget that time when Robbie Williams was Eddie Vedder's stepdad

Taryn Martin-Copes

I always figured why Robbie was a monkey in the film was just a metaphor. That he's always felt like a performing monkey in a circus? 🤷‍♀️

Brad Porter

Give some context to how big Robbie is in Australia, he was the pregame entertainment for our version of the Super Bowl a couple of years ago

Erica Elizabeth

He had a song on his album Escapology which came out in 2002 called Me and My Monkey so I feel like this may have been a theme of his for a while

Sandy Nimmo

He also says at one point that he feels "less evolved" than his peers, given he dropped out of education so early (at 16, he was the youngest in Take That!)

Sandy Nimmo

One thing to mention is that the best post-comeback Take That album by a mile is the one where Robbie's back with them (Progress)

Ross Ward

There was a line towards the end where he said he felt emotionally stunted and "less evolved" than his peers.

Joel

I've always thought Robbie Williams issue with the US was timing as much as personality. He was already calibrated both in music and personality for Take That fans that had grown up, but the "pop" landscape in the US was very aimed at teenagers when Millennium was a modest MTV hit (to the degree pop for grown ups existed it was RnB crossover). Former boy band fans that have grown up were a few years away in the US and they had Justin Timberlake (a not particularly interesting jackass in his own right) to fill that niche. Frankly as someone who was never the fanbase for either, I would say I find Robbie's personality more charismatic, even if the music is mostly just... fine.

Brandon Hay

I'd read somewhere that the reason he's a monkey is a mix of Robbie seeing himself as a monkey compared to the people around him, and also to sell the movie in the US by obscuring the fact it's a biopic. This is anecdotal, but my partner is an American living in the US who has no idea who Robbie Williams is, and he had heard of this movie but had no idea it was a biopic, so if the intent was to hide that fact then they seemingly succeeded, it just didn't get people to want to watch it.

Joe Straatmann

A friend of mine who didn't even know Better Man was a Robbie Williams once said he tried to get tickets to his world tour, and said Williams skipped America and went straight to Mexico City. As an 18-year-old teen who was sick of the TRL overproduced, oversaturated pop (And probably had an "edgelord" dump stat that I eventually got rid of), I loved Robbie Williams... at least until Escapology. I like pop (Secretly at the time), but I needed something more than hot people telling you what you want to hear, and Robbie was that. Yeah, he has "tell you what you want to hear" pop, but he also has enough honestly to connect. By the way, the music video to "Rock DJ" probably is the thing that destroyed his American prospects. Americans cannot deal with anything so on-the-nose. I loved the movie because it kind of operates the same way. Like everyone has noted, this is EVERY music biopic, but because Robbie is telling it and he can operate on that personal honestly, exagerrated or not, and it works on that level. It's not a film celebrating his greatness (The "Rock DJ" segment shows it could've been a fine jukebox musical) since the height of his fame was a drug-addled mess. So it's far better than the hacks who try to make Amy Winehouse biopics. It might be his manipulation, but it works. And this "America was right about him" stuff feels a little weird given we "just" realized how much of a fraud Justin Timberlake's public persona was. We can't smell our own farts, people.

trainboy

Has Lina been doing voice training? Her voice seems a good bit higher than I was when I started listening last summer. Happy for her!

A Grrrl's Two Sound Cents

The thematic element of the monkey was actually pretty substantial to me, especially the scenes where he explains how he'a always felt "unevolved." He's also said many times throughout his career that he struggles constantly with feeling like a performing monkey in a circus as an entertainer. He's a monkey in the movie because that's how he sees himself. So the outright refusal throughout the film to acknowledge the monkey of it all is the whole point. I'm honestly pretty surprised y'all didn't pick up on that. Also to your point about the film being ahistorical: many parts of it definitely are embellished and almost none of the songs are in chronological order of them being written, and Michael Gracey knew that. It's a movie that already exists in a heightened reality with a CGI monkey as a lead, so they really leaned into that. As a musical biopic (emphasis on ~musical~) the movie functions no differently than any other musical, so the purpose the songs serve is a purely emotional one. Rock DJ is a solo Robbie song that came out long past Take That's heyday, but it soundtracks the elation of Take That getting signed, BECAUSE it feels like it needs to. I don't believe the audience was supposed to take away any implication that the scenes with his songs in the film (with the exception of the writing session with Guy Chambers) are in any way context for how the songs started, because they serve more of an emotional purpose than a narrative one. And I believe Robbie Williams and Michael Gracey are way smarter than you're giving them credit for. It's quite clear that this movie was made not to make money, but because Gracey and Williams felt like it needed to be made at any cost, regardless of whether they recouped the $110 million budget or not.