You really can’t make a traditional biopic anymore. If there’s not something different about your film, audiences just won’t accept it these days. Cradle to the grave just doesn’t work. You either need to zoom in on a specific period in your subject’s life or tackle the genre in a different manner. With Better Man, the story of Robbie Williams has a hell of a hook, one I know most people were not expecting. It sounds bonkers, and it is, but somehow, it works.

Better Man is able to distinguish itself by taking the piss out of how traditional this biopic would otherwise be. Williams is a superstar singer, sure, but the rise, fall, and redemption angle has been done so many times before. What makes it so unique here? Well, if you’re somehow not aware, Williams is depicted at all times as a CGI chimpanzee. No one calls attention to it, ever. To everyone else, it’s just Williams. To us, and to the man himself, it’s a chimp telling his tale. Readers, it livens things up in a way that damn near stunned me.

We meet Robbie Williams (Jonno Davies for motion capture, Williams himself for the voice) as a boy (or as a young chimp) trying to impress his performer father Peter (Steve Pemberton). That will be a through line for his whole life, especially when Peter leaves to seek his own success. Left with his mother and grandmother, he’s not much of a student, but he is a showman. Eventually, that sheer force of personality makes him a part of a boy band that blows up, managed by the dismissive Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman), beginning his rise to stardom.

As he becomes more and more famous, Williams becomes a drunk and drug addict, romances Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), and gets into all sorts of trouble, all the while having Peter come in and out of his life. It’s all the sort of thing you’d get bored by, if not for the man himself having so much charisma, plus…yeah, he’s a monkey the whole time. In addition, there’s a sneakily emotional ending that works way better than you’re expecting, too.

Having Robbie Williams voice his CGI self while Jonno Davies plays him through motion capture works so much better than you’d expect it to. Truly it does. They combine to never call attention to the gimmick or to their work, instead capturing the cinematic portrait of the man. It’s real strong teamwork. That’s important, too, since the other performances more or less fade into the background. Steve Pemberton is solid, but he’s in and out of the narrative. In addition to Raechelle Banno and Damon Herriman, supporting players here include Tom Budge, Frazer Hadfield, Anthony Hayes, Kate Mulvaney, Alison Steadman, and more.

Director/co-writer Michael Gracey is emboldened by the ape aspect, which puts the film’s tongue firmly in cheek, even when covering all the expected territory. Along with co-writers Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson, Gracey does the greatest hits, both in terms of the life story and the music. The script is nothing to get too excited about, but Gracey’s direction, which manages to never call extra attention to the chimp, is a highlight. I was not a fan of The Greatest Showman, but Gracey has won me over here. Plus, Williams himself has such personality, that shines through, helping to keep the flick from ever seeming plodding.

Better Man works because it dares to be different in one sense. The biopic aspect is more or less standard issue, but the CGI chimp, alongside Williams’ charisma, is undeniable. Plus, while the original song Forbidden Road is no longer Oscar eligible, it’s a lovely tune at the end. If you’re a Robbie Williams fan, this is a must see. Everyone else? Prepare for something more fun than you might be expecting.

SCORE: ★★★

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Pablo Larraín practically sings when he talks about music. He was listening to John Coltrane on his walk over to the Beverly Hills Four Seasons to chat with The Envelope — he’s on a Coltrane kick — and lately he’s also been enjoying French prog-rock band Magma, opera singer Jessye Norman and some new interpretations of various classical masterworks.

He picks up his AirPods case and says: “This is the most important weapon that I have.”

The Chilean director of “Maria,” which stars Angelina Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas, is clearly a well-versed lover of cinema — but he says he wouldn’t actually consider himself a true cinephile.

“I think I know more about music than movies,” he says. “It’s my life. Music, for me, is the most beautiful and poetic expression that humans have created. I have this fascination toward the exercise of music as the ultimate poetic act.”

This was, in part, what drew him to making a prismatic study of Callas. His previous two films in English, “Jackie” and “Spencer,” similarly explored female icons of the 20th century, both also meditations on grief and the isolation of fame. Those films too were enlivened by music, in the idiosyncratic and remarkable scores by Mica Levi and Jonny Greenwood, respectively.

But Larraín made music — specifically opera — both the text and subtext of his third caged-bird portrait. With a screenplay by Steven Knight (who also wrote “Spencer”), “Maria” trains a spotlight on the final “cycle” of the singer’s troubled life: her last week before she died in 1977. Flashbacks and montages of her girlhood and celebrity prime reveal fragments of her biography, but the movie mostly sifts through the singer’s insomniac and at times hallucinogenic hours wandering her palatial apartment and the streets of Paris to probe the mystery of Callas.

The film tries to take us as close as possible to the diva — Larraín literally shot much of it, operating the camera himself, within a foot or two of Jolie’s face — and inside her mind.

“One of the things that I love about movies, that I think we can do,” he says, “is to show someone’s relationship with reality.” In any given moment of our day, Larraín elaborates, we might be in the middle of a conversation with someone, but any stimuli around us might trigger an emotional memory of our mother, or our kids, or an event from our past.

“Our perception with reality is so fabulous,” says the director, 48, who still lives in Chile with his two teenage children.

Larraín read nine books about Callas, watched every documentary and interview he could find, and after all of that “I had no idea who she was,” he admits. “It’s an enormous amount of mystery — and I’m so drawn to that.”

Choosing her final week, “just one brick of that huge wall of life,” was an attempt to “experience her work,” he says, “and look at her ghost, and try to understand certain things. But mostly it’s not a rational experience. It’s around something that is about to vanish. It’s an exercise of human poetry.”

Which is where music became all-important. As Callas glides from a conversation with her butler to an interview with an imaginary journalist to strained rehearsals with a patient pianist, the music of her past invades the narrative — sometimes in visually fantastical ways.

In one scene, Callas is walking past a theater and an orchestra materializes in the rain — and suddenly she’s in a scene from the second act of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Passersby become the humming choir from the scene in that opera where the main character, Cio-Cio-San, is longingly waiting for her American captain to return to Japan.

In the opera, “She’s trying to sleep,” Larraín explains. “So the people, the choir, come together to sing this very peaceful music for her to sleep — but she can’t.”

Every aria or opera selection was made with dramatic intention; Larraín says the soundtrack is “the hidden map” of the movie.

At another point in the film, Callas attempts to sing “O Mio Babbino Caro” — translated “Oh, My Dear Father,” from Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” — during a rehearsal. Callas “had a very particular relationship with her father, who was an absent figure in her life,” says Larraín. “And in that moment, when she tries to see the state of her voice, she chooses to think about her father.”

Originally, the director planned to include subtitles so the audience could understand this illuminating map, “but then it became such a rational exercise,” he says. “It was so distracting to read the subtitles — it was just taking all the emotion out. And opera is about an emotional transit.”

He’s counting on the audience to have a more “subliminal perception, that maybe music would transmit that without the words.”

While making the film, he often thought about conductor Tullio Serafin’s advice to Callas in case she ever lost track of where her character was in the story, emotionally or dramatically, while onstage: “Just follow the music.”

“I took that as a mantra,” Larraín says, “for the film, and for her.”

“People make up their past, they remember what they want, they forget the rest.”

So says Timothée Chalamet, who plays Bob Dylan in the brilliant new film, A Complete Unknown, in a tense confrontation with Elle Fanning, who plays Sylvie Russo, a character based on Dylan’s on-and-off NYC girlfriend Suze Rotolo, as she prods him to share more about his mysterious past. Of course, he doesn’t, setting the stage for the enduring mystery of perhaps the greatest singer-songwriter of all time, a puzzle that continues to intrigue us.

I was fortunate to attend an advance screening of the movie over the weekend, and I can assure you, the buzz around this film is real. A Complete Unknown deserves all the accolades you’ve been hearing – including three Golden Globe nominations and Oscar talk for Chalamet, as well as for Edward Norton, who plays a perfect Pete Seeger. At the screening, the sold-out Newport audience widely applauded the film as the closing credits rolled; no one yelled “Judas” and no boos were audible.

The film, which should appeal to a wide audience given Chalamet’s youthful charm, opens Christmas Day across the country and begins an extensive run at Newport’s Jane Pickens Theatre on December 26. Advance tickets are available here.

Unlike some other great music biopics (Walk the Line, Bohemian Rhapsody, Coal Miner’s Daughter), A Complete Unknown covers a comparatively brief period in Dylan’s life, from his arrival and rise to fame in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961, to that divisive moment when he “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a cultural moment as important as Elvis on Ed Sullivan or The Beatles landing at JFK.

Chalamet is extraordinary playing the well-known singer, but still manages to build out his own character, much like Joachin Phoenix did in his Johnny Cash interpretation in I Walk the Line. And that’s not easy – Dylan is quirky and not easy to mimic. In interviews, Chalamet has said that he had several years to learn Dylan’s mannerisms, mirroring his vocals and acquiring his distinct guitar strumming patterns. He sings all the songs in the film, very close to the original recordings. And it works – Dylan himself recently approved the performance in a widely shared tweet.

Director James Mangold boldly re-creates Greenwich Village in the early 60s, with all the spirited grit and grime of the time, in street scenes and tightly packed basement nightclubs where folk music ruled the day. The story is compelling, the music is authentic, and the acting is outstanding all-around, with love interests Elle Fanning (Sylvie Russo) and Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez) brilliant in their supporting roles.

Mangold doesn’t over-mythologize Dylan, and the film doesn’t shy away from the singer’s darker side, his often rude treatment of those close to him, especially women, and his nasty eye rolls directed toward his mentor, folk legend Pete Seeger. Bob Dylan – always an enigma, kind of a bully, and occasionally “an asshole” as Barbaro, playing Baez, tells him.

Of course, the film plays fast and loose with many facts; Rolling Stone magazine spotted over two dozen places where the film veers from the known historical record, but let’s remember that this a work of historical fiction, not a documentary. It’s closer to the spirit of the truth than anything else I’ve seen about Dylan, including interviews with the bard, who is known for his reticence and occasional deception. The story closely mirrors that period in his life, and the spirit of the narrative is certainly one version of the truth. 

Meanwhile, here on Aquidneck Island, where Dylan and his like stormed the Bastille at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he’s not so unknown. His spirit is ever present at the Festival, where he appeared from 1963-1965 and again in 2002, sporting a strange wig that still has fans guessing. The “City by the Sea,” along with Greenwich Village, serve almost as co-stars in the film, with frequent Newport references and numerous scenes from the festival grounds and the Viking Hotel. (Note: those scenes were filmed mainly in New Jersey.)

As far as getting to know Dylan’s motivations a little better through the film, that ain’t happening. Chalamet plays him close to the chest, as elusive as ever. When I interviewed longtime Festival producer George Wein in 2015, he told me that Dylan, like Miles Davis in the jazz world, intentionally curated a certain persona, centered around an air of mystery. “Both were always concerned with not doing what you expected of them … throughout their life,” said Wein. “Dylan, his last album, nobody would ever dream he would do an album of Tin Pan Alley ballads.”

The film echoes Wein’s remarks. Dylan was never afraid to take the initiative, from visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital when he arrived in New York to choosing an electric guitar at Newport in ’65. Sure, he was influenced by the people around him, but he was always his own boss, rarely submitting to the will of others. He did things his way, and continues to do so, like it or not. Perhaps that’s part of the reason he’s such the icon he has become today. Indeed, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

Click here for more information on A Complete Unknown.