Almost half a century ago, an advertising campaign promised audiences that they would believe a man could fly. They did, and the “man” was no mere man. He was Superman. The result, the aptly if unimaginatively titled Superman: The Movie, converted comic-book superheroes into big-budget, epic-scaled, blockbuster entertainment. It created a new, often imitated but seldom equalled standard for realism and verisimilitude.

Although believing a man could fly in the winter of 1978 still relied on the suspension of disbelief, audiences have embraced practically everything superhero-related with little, if any, reservation and even less doubt in the decades since Superman debuted. Better Man, a reimagining of a standard-issue musical biopic, tells the story of Brit-pop superstar Robbie Williams with a CGI simian standing in for the performer. It seems like a big, even impossible ask, absurd in conception and absurd on its face (literally and figuratively).

And yet, despite–or maybe because of–that conceit, co-writer/director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) delivers an energetic, sometimes frenetic but never dull, masterclass in pop entertainment, the kind rarely scene outside of the waning superhero genre. It mightily helps that the subject of said musical biopic, Robbie Williams, narrates an overview of a not unfamiliar life story with a self-aware, profanity-laced irreverence atypical for the usually serious-minded, formulaic genre that was so easily mocked almost two decades ago in Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

It’s even more hilarious when his working-class putdowns, insults, and cursing come out of a semi-realistically rendered, human-sized simian (Williams provided the voice acting while Jonno Davies handled mo-cap duties for WETA’s animators). The idea for Williams’s simian stand-in came from a conversation he had with writer-director Gracey before they began production. In a sit-down, Williams shared the thought that he often felt like a lower primate whenever he was on stage performing any one of his pop hits for crowds numbering from a few hundred to almost two hundred thousand.

Even when a Better Man focuses on Williams as a pre-teen, he’s in full-on furry mode, mocked, ignored, and on occasion, verbally abused by neighbourhood kids. Tracey turns Williams’s fixation on becoming a “somebody” instead of a “nobody” into Williams’s greatest, life-defining fear. That same fear repeatedly appears in hallucinatory form as a doppelgänger only Williams sees, calling out his anxieties, exhorting Williams to self-harm, and threatening him with annihilating violence. Early on, Williams defines becoming a “somebody” with fame and fortune, both seemingly impossible given his working-class roots, poor school grades, and a semi-absent, self-absorbed father (Steve Pemberton).

As a teen with a massive, Gibraltar-sized chip on his shoulder, Williams hides his fears and anxieties in an openly rebellious attitude, crude verbosity, and faux bravado. It’s enough to get him noticed when he auditions for a boy band, Take That, managed by Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman). He wins a spot in the five-boy band and over-indulges in the fruits of success (e.g., sex, drugs, alcohol), before crashing out at 21, exiled from the band for his uncontrollable behaviour and constant friction with Martin-Smith and the other members of the band.

From there, it’s only a hop, skip, and a meet-cute with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), the lead singer of all-girl band All Saints, a brief stint of domestic bliss, before it’s all undone (again) by Williams’s over-reliance on drugs, alcohol, and unauthorized sex partners to assuage the fear and anxiety demons that seemingly dictate his self-destructive behaviour. Despite his floundering relationship with Nicole, Williams rises to new heights as a solo artist, releasing hit after hit, and playing at bigger and bigger venues.

As Williams’s professional life gains him greater fame and a bigger bank account, his personal life seems headed for a sky-dive out of a plane without a parachute, all of which Gracey handles with an almost irresistible voyeuristic fetish for degradation. Given Williams’s depiction as a simian, his inevitable fall never takes on the otherwise obligatory grimness typical of the genre. Instead, Williams’s fall, however accurate to his real-life experience, takes on a measure of absurd surrealism, especially considering the matter-of-fact manner in which everyone else interacts with Williams in his shaggy-haired, simian form.

When Williams isn’t making every effort to ruin his life, he’s either rehearsing or on-stage performing any number of Take That pop hits or his own, more smoothly rendered, slightly more adult ones. A music director by experience, Tracey handles the musical performances with a crowd-pleasing to some, irritating to others, maximalist style. There’s little doubt, however, that the songs, whatever their merit or placement in the English-language pop canon, remain irreducibly catchy and hummable, driven by dance floor-influenced beats and performed with intensely cheeky dedication by the cast. They, like Gracey and Williams himself, most definitely understood the assignment.

Better Man opens theatrically on Wednesday, December 25, via Paramount Pictures.