“Who is Robbie Williams?” this film asks. While the question may be targeted at most of the globe in a figurative sense, many North Americans may be asking literally. Williams’ 2000 phenomenon “Rock DJ” only gained a brief bump in perplexing curiosity due to its graphic music video appearing on MTV countdowns while his ‘ 2005 single “Angel” is the only song to gain any traction on the US Billboard Hot 100. Beyond that, his name is more often confused with beloved actor Robin Williams to the American brain. While he, career-wise, is the Justin Timberlake of the UK (if Timberlake eventually morphed into an inspirational Michael Buble-type), releasing Better Man, the film biopic of Williams in North America was always going to be a box office gamble. Now imagine if he was also portrayed by a photorealistic CGI chimpanzee.

But that is how Robbie sees himself and that is how we see Robbie. Starting his journey as an unathletic, jazz-obsessed theatre kid, Williams (played as a child by Carter J. Murphy and as an adult by both Jonno Davies through motion capture and Williams providing his own singing voice) admits almost immediately that his social anxiety and complicated daddy issues led him to act irrationally and obnoxiously to mask his feelings. But its this attitude that catches the eye of Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) who recruits Williams to join the soon-to-be uber-popular boy band Take That. Once he discovers his worst instincts are actually the key to his success, he leans into them and proves himself correct.

While destructive to his family (his grandmother lovingly played by Alison Steadman), his relationships (his girlfriend and eventual fiance Nicole Appleton, played by Raechelle Banno) and his friends, Williams is most destructive to himself, leading himself down the path of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. This tends to be the standard formula for most musical biopics, but Better Man cracks the code in making this work. It’s unforgiving, it’s self-admission, it’s coming truthfully from the voice of the subject. Williams’ fingerprints are all over this, but not in a single frame does he ask you to like him. He just wants you to understand him. While the chimpanzee digital makeup may seem like a distracting gimmick, it’s actually a miraculously genius tool in allowing us to both tolerate him at least 5% more but also sympathizing with the animal he believed he was. The world of celebrity is a zoo and Williams is the ape in the cage his audience is pointing their fingers at.

Michael Gracey, stepping up magnificently from 2017’s The Greatest Showman, concocts visual ideas so intoxicating and so caffeinated, that other musical films should feel embarrassed. The massive swing of its visual effects use works seamlessly. Minutes in, you may even forget what Williams looks like because his soul is so magnetically translated and seen through those ape eyes.

From the moment the “Rock DJ” sequence begins, choreographed with jaw-dropping audacity, the film never lets up. Through the ups and downs, he and Williams deliver a personal, tragic, uplifting cinematic experience and one of the hugest surprises of the year. Who is Robbie Williams? If you don’t know, maybe it’s worth finding out.