Lest anyone come away from this thinking that “Better Man” is all about the lurid spectacle of a famous figure’s fall from grace, I assure you that’s only the half of it. The biopic is even more interested in Robbie Williams’ famous comeback, turning his life and his career around over the course of several years — not necessarily through willpower alone, but by the healing and redemptive power of rehab. For director Michael Gracey, that played a fairly significant role in what goes down during the Knebworth Festival mayhem:
“The idea of fighting yourself is something I think we’re all familiar with, and you get an idea of that self-loathing and that self-judgement going through every performance that he does. He’s always clocking himself out in the audience, looking out in disgust. So it reaches this point at Knebworth, because you go, in your head, ‘Oh, this is obviously this guy’s greatest moment of his life. He’s performing to 125,000 people, he did it three nights in a row, he broke every record at the time.’ You’re just like, this is what you think is someone’s greatest moment of happiness where he’s fulfilling all his dreams. And yet, at the time, it was an absolute nightmare. Robbie doesn’t remember that performance at all, which, to me, speaks to how checked out he was, mentally. That’s incredible, to have one of the greatest moments you could ever experience and not remember it.”
Where “Better Man” shines the most is in its depiction of a concert that starts out lively and fun … only to devolve into a harrowing battle in Robbie Williams’ mind, culminating in a dark moment where he gruesomely slays an attacker revealed to be himself as a kid. For Gracey, that sudden low point had its roots in a real-world therapeutic approach for those in rehab. As he explained:
“And then obviously it comes to quite an abrupt halt when he kills his younger self, which is based on going to rehab and one of the techniques where they show you a photo of your younger self at age five or six, and basically say, ‘Would you be doing what you’re doing to yourself to this little boy?’ And of course people are like, ‘No, I freaking love that kid. As if I would do this to that boy.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, that’s you.'”
You can hear Jacob Hall’s full interview with Gracey in the back half of today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
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