Outside of a brief late-’90s run, Robbie Williams’ name hasn’t rung too many bells in the US. In the UK, however, Williams is the stuff of myth — the former boy-band bad boy who went solo and became an irrepressible and all-conquering pop star. Last year, Williams was the subject of a Netflix docuseries. Now, he’s getting a full-on big-budget biopic from the director of The Greatest Showman. This one has a twist: The role of Robbie Williams will be portrayed by a CGI monkey.

Back in 2021, Greatest Showman auteur Michael Gracey announced his plan to make a Robbie Williams biopic. He didn’t say anything about the whole CGI-monkey situation then, but that’s the choice that he and Williams have evidently made. Better Man is getting an Oscar-season push, and from everything you can see in the film’s new teaser trailer, it looks like a pretty standard pop-star biopic, except with a CGI monkey for a hero.

As far as we can tell, Better Man is not a thought experiment about what happens when an actual animal becomes a pop star. It’s not the Chappell Roan/Moo Deng SNL skit. Instead, Robbie Williams, narrating his own trailer, says something about how he’s always seen himself a little differently, so we’re presumably meant to understand that the monkey is simply Williams’ self-image, projected onscreen. Williams himself voices the monkey, which gets around the awkward business of casting an actor to play an aging but iconic star.

The Better Man trailer is just slightly longer than a minute, but it’s fucking hilarious. It’s a Pixelated chimp with a British accent jumping down from a festival ceiling announcing that he’s about to rock, or mugging for paparazzi, or determinedly announcing that he’ll do whatever it takes. I don’t know whether this joke can sustain itself for two hours, but as a trailer? Magnificent. Behold its splendor below.

Better Man, a Paramount Pictures film, opens on Christmas.