All of a sudden, not one but two musician biopics arrive that offer something genuinely different, freshening up a tired genre, writes Luke Buckmaster.
Better Man (2024)
For a long time the musician biopic genre has felt rather crusty, hard-coded with stories about lucky breaks, fawning crowds, descents into self-destruction and, of course, Important Life Lessons. Jake Kasdan’s great comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story parodied its clichés way back in 2007, and they’ve continued unabated, recent years delivering cinematic treatment to the likes of Bob Marley, Amy Winehouse, Freddie Mercury, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and many others. One can be forgiven for greeting the news of an upcoming biopic with a resounding “meh,” given how many timeworn conventions have stuck to the template like barnacles to a ship.
And yet, all of a sudden, in the final legs of 2024, as the year takes its final breaths, not one but two new musical biopics arrive that actually feel fresh and suggest a different path forward—at least aesthetically speaking. Both have wacky high concept premises that guarentee them water cooler status: in Better Man, Robbie Williams is played by a CGI chimpanzee; in Piece by Piece, Pharrell Williams’ life story is told through Lego. In both instances a single central decision has a profound impact, hugely influencing the shape and form of the film.
Let’s get the monkey business out of the way first. I recently heard that Williams, the UK superstar who started out as a member of boy band Take That, currently lives in Los Angeles because he’s less recognised in America, able to go about his daily business without too much bother. Williams provided a fun justification as to why a chimp portrays him—joking that he’s “less evolved” than other people—but perhaps it also had something to do with preserving that semi-incognito American status. The obvious question is why a simian plays him; a more interesting question is: why not?
When motion pictures began, the camera was a simple recording device, capturing visual information in front of it. But the rise and ubiquity of computer-generated images has pushed multiplex moviemaking into an increasingly unreal space, making it less a facsimile of reality and more like a form of painting. Nevertheless, in a pictorial medium where virtually anything is possible, realism has continued as a key modus operandi, even spectacularly silly productions (like MCU movies) being designed to appear as if they belong in our world.
Director Michael Gracey’s decision to portray Williams as a chimp rejects this dominant view, nudging the film away from the idea of motion pictures as a mirror of reality and into a more heightened space, allowing an easy passage into visual symbolism and metaphor. We’re aware of the dynamic between real and artificial throughout Better Man; it’s apparent whenever we look at the protagonist. At the same time Gracey demonstrates how readily we accept the reality we’re given—so long as other fundamentals, like emotional truth, are in working order. And this is where the film excels: despite following an archetype trajectory, emotionally it feels explosively raw and candid.
Whereas Better Man shows us how one character’s design influences the rest of the film, Piece by Piece’s central concept extends to all corners of its mise en scène. Everything—and everyone—is styled to look like Lego, that iconic block-like aesthetic. Director Morgan Neville’s film is a bit of a puff piece, laying the subject’s artistic genius on thick, but like the chimp, the Lego design has changed our vision, getting us looking at things differently.
When we see a recreation of Pharrell’s old home neighbourhood, during an early segment exploring his formative years, it really comes alive, it really pops and shines. The community looks joyful and vibrant, the lil people inside their lil Lego apartments drinking their lil Lego coffees and watching their lil Lego TVs. Outside, people play Lego guitars and walk Lego streets and buy Lego ice cream. How would these visions have looked and felt in live action? Those sunshine-bathed streets might have resembled a parody of postcard suburbia, fake and kitsch, Somewhere That’s Green-esque.
But in Piece by Piece it works beautifully, merging set design with an underlying sense of nostalgia. There’s a feeling that this iconic plastic toy line is a kind of uniting space, bringing people and stories together. For many if not most of us, Lego indeed is something associated with our own upbringings; seeing visions of somebody else’s early years modelled using elements associated with our own brings an extra layer of connection.
Like in Better Man, Neville is less interested in what happened than how it felt. It’s true that both films have a ring of novelty about them, and one hardly feels inclined to wish for another chimp-filled or Lego-inspired biopic. But at least they’re doing something different, zhushing up the format, blasting some of those barnacles off the ship. Let’s hope others follow suit.
