Following the huge success of 'Rocketman' (which he produced), Michael Gracey delves into the life of Britain's best-selling local artist with a surprising twist: he appears throughout the film as a computer-generated monkey.

When Robbie Williams told an interviewer he felt like a performing monkey, he didn’t mean it literally. But that’s exactly how “The Greatest Showman” director Michael Gracey interprets the remark in “Better Man,” an off-kilter musical biopic that would surely have come across as banal — rather than outright idiotic — had a real-life actor played Robbie Williams.

Gracey takes the audience through all the expected beats of Williams’ career, from his breakthrough as a member of Take That to his record-breaking solo concert at Knebworth, but does so with a CG chimpanzee standing in for the Britpop bad boy. Against all odds, the gimmick works, and it sets the project apart from so many other pop-star hagiographies. If you want to spend four hours rooting for this boy-band backing vocalist turned solo superstar, check out the Netflix documentary series Robbie Williams. But if you want to see a chimp do coke with Oasis, or perform an ill-fated handjob for manager Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman), this is the film for you.

By casting someone who looks an awful lot like Caesar from the new and improved "Planet of the Apes" franchise in Williams's place, Gracey dodges the biggest question people have about musical biopics, which is: "Who's going to play him?" So if you're worried that the whole chimpanzee thing might be distracting, just remember how silly it felt to pretend that Elton John's life would have turned out the same if he'd looked like Taron Egerton, or that a pair of false teeth could transform Rami Malek into the strutting phallus that was Freddie Mercury.