For American audiences, at the least, the film musical Higher Man is a reasonably exhausting promote. It’s an odd-sounding undertaking — a music biopic with the main man changed by a CG chimp, constructed across the profession of a world celebrity and former boy-band member who’s by no means actually damaged by means of within the States. People don’t share the remainder of the world’s fascination with pop singer Robbie Williams, regardless of his 14 chart-topping albums, common presence in U.Okay. tabloids, and cheeky, viral-friendly music movies. (Be aware: 107 million views on that video alone, and it isn’t even near his most-viewed hit, “Angels.”) So the thought of a biopic may not have any prompt enchantment for U.S. viewers, even with that “ape protagonist” gimmick including some intrigue.
However whereas the film is drawn from Williams’ life, it’s nonetheless higher to think about it as a fantasy characteristic. Director Michael Gracey beforehand turned P.T. Barnum’s profession into the rousing, ultra-popular musical film The Best Showman, whereas glossing over or revising a lot of the actuality of Barnum’s life and work. Whereas Higher Man comes nearer to the reality about Williams’ historical past, it equally performs with picture and emotion over info, notably relating to the music. Simply as Gracey replaces Williams with an ape for a wide range of causes (extra on that in a bit), he fictionalizes and broadens his topic’s story. Extra considerably, although, he tells the story by means of fantasy sequences so daring, expressive, and visually startling that the results dominate the film.
Picture: Paramount Photos/Everett Assortment
Actor Jonno Davies performs Williams all through the film for mo-cap functions, as he grows up as a swaggering, attention-hungry showoff in a tense working-class family. He will get his first shot of nationwide fame as a teen, when producer Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) picks him for manufactured boy band Take That, which rockets to large success. (Time later described the fandom across the band as “the 90s’ model of Beatlemania.”)
The standard behind-the-scenes drama follows: despair, substance abuse, vanity and alienation, a bottoming-out, a restoration and revival. However the fundamental beats don’t matter as a lot as the way in which Gracey depicts them, by means of bravura sequences the place Williams and his cohorts journey by means of a spinning, mutating fantasy model of London’s Regent Road, or with zombie-like hordes of paparazzi attacking Williams underwater, in a set-piece straight out of Aquaman’s Trench struggle.
Higher Man is brazenly constructed extra round Williams’ emotional expertise of his life than round a sober reconstruction of its occasions: Presumably he by no means truly fought 110,000 variations of himself in a gory, over-the-top battle royale set to “Let Me Entertain You.” If nothing else, timeline nitpickers might escape in hives over the way in which music from all through Williams’ profession is used to signify emotional moments from completely completely different elements of his historical past. However the full-throated fantasy strategy lets Gracey escape the standard queasy questions on constancy to fact in a biopic. When your main man is an ape working in a human world, how may anybody miss that the strategy is extra about picture and sensation than about factual precision?
That central conceit, of Robbie Williams as a monkey-man amongst people, offers Gracey a number of additional visible enchantment, nevertheless it additionally serves as a potent metaphor. He and Williams have given completely different causes for the strategy: Within the movie itself, Williams simply says he’s all the time seen himself as “rather less developed” than different individuals. In different interviews, Gracey has talked about eager to distance the viewers from actuality in order that they’ll higher settle for the unreality of a musical, or about merely needing a gimmick to keep away from making simply one other samey biopic.
And forward of the film’s launch, Williams and Gracey launched a video clip the place they provide a totally completely different motive: Gracey says he was impressed by Williams griping about “being dragged up on stage to carry out like a monkey,” and he determined to make that concept literal and tangible.
However apart from these justifications, presenting Higher Man’s topic as a literal animal, a unique creature from everybody round him, lets Gracey lean on the themes of Williams’ alienation and sense of separation. Whether or not the barrier is his bottomless starvation for consideration, the way in which he struggles with medication and alcohol whereas his boy-band friends appear bodily and emotionally more healthy, the way in which his fame distances him from his household and former pals, or simply the way in which he continuously yearns for approval from a father who’s busy chasing his personal type of fame, Williams is ready other than the world. Framing the film round probably the most self-deprecating, instinct-driven model of his self-image underlines the purpose in each shot, with out the necessity for exposition.
And there’s a damaging, animalistic aspect to the ape picture as nicely. Wētā FX, the results home behind the Planet of the Apes motion pictures, offers Williams an expressive and plausible chimp face and an in depth chimp pelt, however retains his physique language and bodily type largely human. Nonetheless, there’s an atavistic hazard to Williams’ offended or fearful moments on the display screen, as he beats his chest or bares his fangs. In these moments, he feels way more harmful to these round him, and much much less in management, than any human character.
All of that, plus the ambitiously wild musical sequences, leaves Higher Man as a spectacle film worthy of sharing multiplexes and audiences with Depraved. It’s seemingly designed extra for followers of immersive, Wētā-centric fantasy worlds just like the Planet of the Apes or Lord of the Rings motion pictures than it’s geared toward followers of pop music historical past — and even of Williams himself. (Netflix has a four-part documentary on Williams’ life and profession for these on the lookout for a extra factually pushed strategy.) By the tip, viewers could also be curious to study extra about Williams as a performer and character, or to dig deeper into his discography.
However the Higher Man expertise is extra akin to watching a standout Bollywood musical or a Baz Luhrmann spectacular like Moulin Rouge! than to watching an episode of Behind the Music. Most musicals translate emotion into music. This one takes {that a} step additional, translating emotion right into a daring central gimmick. It’s experimental and explosive. Even for these with no funding in Williams’ work or earlier data of his profession, it’s well worth the watch simply to see how Gracey fills the display screen with vitality and verve, with mesmerizing staging designed to overwhelm the viewers’s senses and make sure that they stroll out singing.
Higher Man is in theaters now.