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Before I watched Better Man, the Robbie Williams as chimpanzee movie, what I knew about Robbie Williams was he was English. Upon watching Better Man, I realized I at least knew some of Take That and probably had heard “Angels” once or twice. That was the extent of it.  I harbor no real strong feelings about his music. Some of it is catchy.

I absolutely fucking hated this movie.

Truthfully, it has some good points, including sequences that take the natural abstraction of musicals into CGI bravura territory. Robbie Williams himself does a good job voice-acting himself. But some people just don’t get along, and the entire time I was watching this movie, I was getting the dread. I hated it on a level beyond whether or not it’s a bad movie. Let’s put it this way: oil and water are both useful substances, but they will never mix. The likelihood of me liking this movie was low (allergy to musicals, very English, quippy protagonist), but I hated it even more than that. I hated it in the way that Batman hates the Joker or Jordan hated Isaiah Thomas.

I don’t want to spend an extended amount of this review ragging on England. Americans, including myself, are always a little too willing to throw stones inside the glass house of Anglo-America. A lot of the problems with England are problems we have. At the same time, though: because I lack context for English life, it felt like I got a vision of a lesser hell, one full of working men’s clubs where the reddest men you’ve ever seen sing music hall ditties. It should go without saying: I was celebrating new employment and the medicine hit different than it used to. If ever I was in the mood for some chimp shenanigans, it was that night. Instead I sat there in fear, wondering if Jimmy Saville was going to round the corner any second and ask for my TV license.

Setting aside: having watched this, I think people were seduced by the fact it stars Robbie Williams as a monkey. Everything else in this movie is boilerplate music bio stuff. A lot of film critics are more willing to be seduced by novelty than they want you to think. That’s why you see some numbskull being like “Fast Eleven has a scene where Ludacris uses his car as a drone to kill an Iranian general. Five stars,” despite the fact there hasn’t been a good Fast and the Furious movie since the seventh one. Or the love of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which ties its Reddit “I imagined the ultimate chaos of the void as an everything bagel” shit to a wanly dramatized story about immigrant expectations. If this movie had starred a real person and not a CGI chimp, it’d have a middling Rotten Tomatoes score.

Because the only thing that separates this from every other music biopic is that it has us imagine a world where Robbie Williams is a chimp. Robbie is talented but wants out of his shitty Northern England town. His charm gets him a gig with Take That, a boy band that becomes a sensation making house-sounding pop music. But nobody appreciates Robbie’s talent! He gets into drinking and drugs to deal with the pressure (often depicted by a series of evil past called Phantom Robbies, which is maybe the only point the movie seems like it could be a slightly ridiculous parody of music biopics)! He gets kicked out of Take That because he’s drinking and doing drugs! He meets a nice lady, but he is awful to her because of the drugs and drinking! She leaves because he’s fucking everything that moves, probably because of the drugs, and the drinking! He spirals out of control, because he’s doing drugs and drinking a lot, and after the biggest show of his life, he gets sober! If this movie didn’t star a cheeky British man whose avatar was a chimpanzee, we’d call this the slop it is. Instead, this shit got nominated for an Academy Award for graphics. Fair play, except to these eyes, there’s something prominently AI about chimp Robbie, like he’s going to introduce me to a sad old veteran who had nobody come to his birthday party but Donald Trump.

They don’t even do anything with the fact he’s a chimp. Everyone just goes, “Oh yeah, there’s a boy band with a chimp in it.” If your movie transmogrifies its star into a chimp and you do nothing with the fact he’s a chimp besides, “Wouldn’t it be funny if a chimp boy did drugs”, then you didn’t need to make him a chimp.

Then there’s how Robbie is written. I understand I’m in an exaggerated rise-and-fall-and-rise again story, but Robbie cannot stop quipping in any moment. The movie wants me to understand this as a defense mechanism. So is skunk spray, and I don’t love how that smells. There is not a single moment where Robbie isn’t presented with a problem that he doesn’t have an overwritten quip as an immediate rejoinder, something that sounds witty but isn’t. Because the script cannot stop loading up Robbie with cheeky quips (I understand he’s probably known for this but a movie is not reality) it feels like a Marvel movie.

Also like a Marvel movie, it’s way too long. At 90 minutes, I might have been a little more receptive but because we’ve forgotten how to pace movies, this thing is 135 minutes of watching a chimpanzee pop star drink and drug and occasionally throw out an Absolute Bloody Legend quip as he realizes he’s treated everybody like shit, like Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, James Brown, Dewey Cox, the Beatles when the Beatles cinematic universe by Sam Mendes happens, Elvis, Notorious BIG, NWA, Michael Jackson, Spinal Tap, the Naked Brothers Band, Jim Morrison, the band from that rock and roll parody novel that I was going to basically inspired by the arc of The Black Crowes going from bitching about Miller Lite sponsoring that tour, (which, by the way, that was totally massaged by their manager) to taking corporate gigs by the score because I had a whole thing where I  finally got sick of rock and roll myths because I read Adorno’s “The Culture Industry”, Josie and the Pussycats, whatever band Jabberjaw was in, the Wiggles, the Banana Splits, and countless others.

Now it’s time for me to talk about something near and dear to me: self loathing. I do not know much about England, but when it comes to the violent rejection of self and being I am well acquainted with all the attendant tactics we use to get away from ourselves. The movie’s established pattern of “bad Robbie behavior, but then a reminder he’s really sad” has been the same pattern used by every bloviating Notes app apology since phones could easily take screenshots. It’s not so much that the film suffers from actions turning into consequences. That’s the base formulation of drama. But there’s a point at which you become so successful that hearing about your “self-loathing” can only make me retch. After Robbie becomes enormous, it doesn’t take away things like his dad being a piece of shit or his own doubts.

But at the same time: there are billions of people on the planet each day who have their own self-loathing to deal with when they wake up, and they don’t wake up with a successful musical career. The difference is this: Robbie Williams and any celebrity who wants to tell me about dealing with mental health is using mental health as a bridge to relate to the Common Man. Robbie Williams can hang out with Oasis (that Liam Gallagher costume was by far the funniest thing in the movie besides a shot of Monkey Robbie solemnly shooting up) run through scores of screaming female fans, and generally only work when has to, but I’m supposed to feel like he’s in the same mud as me? Because he gets sad sometimes? Getting sad is the price for being alive, and as far as I can tell, being alive is the best game in town, outside of escaping the cycle of birth and death. Celebrities want praise for being human; the rest of us just clock in and keep our mouths shut.

It all comes back to the monkey for me. I understand the metaphor and that it’s supposed to communicate that I’m dealing with a little rascal. One would think a movie where a guy views himself as a monkey would be less sanctimonious about itself, wanting you to understand it’s so hard by meeting us in the middle: what if you were a preternaturally talented ape? Everybody would look at you too! It’s a huge detour to get back to the point that celebrities obviously struggle with: the Crowd is full of people. What Robbie does is try to get us to view him a little lower than the crowd so we can understand how much of a wreck he was. In its way, it’s a continuing of the same self-loathing that he sees in Evil Crowd Apes (note that the Evil Crowd Apes are among his regular fans, watching him and jeering), except extended to an entire movie.

Self-loathing has a loose relationship with the truth and I know this because there are definitely worse people in history than me, despite what I’ve often thought of myself. In Robbie’s case, it’s that there are thousands of adoring fans willing to see him sing completely cromulent english pop music. But because the film can’t just risk the status of Robbie being a human, they have to make him both worse and better because, hey, at least he’s in on the joke. He agreed to be represented as a chimpanzee for Christ’s sakes!

It’s that same “fame, ain’t it crazy” tenor that most of Drake’s music has and as was said about Drake by a Lilliputian rapper from LA: “only you love being famous”. Throughout the film, Robbie talks about the value of being an entertainer, of getting people away from their day to day lives, the same way he used to sit and watch Rat Pack videos with his dad, who ran off to be a shitty stand-up. There is at no point Robbie Williams ever talks about artistry or trying to write a song better than anybody else. It’s all about the glitz, glamor, and show. He might hate himself, but not as much as he loves being famous, and I have to wonder: would you hate yourself so much if you weren’t depicting your entire raison d’etre as being an entertainer? Never letting your own concerns and what you want run the show? I imagine the real Robbie does care about music more than this, which is why it’s baffling what they choose to highlight in this movie.

Maybe that exhaustion is why he ends the movie, after two-and-a-quarter hours of bad ape behavior and eventual redemption and a performance of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” (the number one song played by assholes at funerals) with an invitation for the audience to “Fuck yourselves.” That’s a hell of a way to end your movie when you’ve whined about choosing to live your life for crowds of people who don’t know you.

I won’t tell you what I said to the TV.