Perhaps the bleakest second in Netflix’s Robbie Williams – a brand new four-part documentary sequence with no scarcity of bleak moments – can also be its most telling. The yr is 1999 and the titular famous person is getting ready to carry out to a stadium-sized viewers at Slane Castle in Ireland.
“How excited are you?” asks an interviewer. “I’ve been in a black melancholy for in regards to the final 5 weeks,” Robbie replies flatly, “and got here out of it final week, so I’m not enthusiastic about very a lot on the minute… I’m frightened of every part.” This is just not the reply the interviewer was in search of, so they struggle once more. Is Robbie wanting ahead to the present? “Definitely!” the pop star replies with a rictus grin, sticking to the transient this time. “There’s gonna be 80,000 individuals there… It’s gonna be a beautiful expertise.”
Robbie Williams is a story of the final period of super-charged movie star. It’s an unflinching depiction of tabloid fuckery, mass ignorance of psychological well being points and a pre-social media age by which a handful of celebrities discovered themselves on the molten centre of the popular culture universe. Few, after all, remained unscathed. The set-up is modern: director Joe Pearlman eschews the standard speaking heads to deal with Robbie himself, who’s proven beforehand unseen archive footage from all through his profession and responds to it in real-time. For some motive, he often does so in his pants.
Anyway, right here he’s at 16, a working-class boy from Stoke-On-Trent thrown headfirst into fame as one-fifth of Take That. “It was an entire dunking into the grownup world that I used to be not prepared for,” middle-aged Robbie tells Pearlman of the following acrimony that leads to his notorious break up from the band. Another harrowing scene sees him onstage, now a solo star, berating former bandmate Gary Barlow: “He’s not promoting any extra data now, women! Let’s face it: he’s useless!”
Today, together with his younger daughter by his facet, Robbie appears to be like bereft. “I’m sorry that I handled Gary like that,” he says quietly. This is the best use of a story mechanism that may typically develop into claustrophobic, making the documentary slender in scope. Robbie has, nonetheless, described the sequence as his proper of reply to infinite abuse from the press. In this respect, his lowest ebb coincides together with his industrial peak.
Locked into two nights at Roundhay Park in Leeds as a part of 2006’s unsustainably huge Close Encounters Tour, he’s shaken by a brutal evaluation of the broadly ridiculed ‘Rudebox’, which he earnestly believed could be “greater than ‘Angels’”. The damage spirals right into a full-scale panic assault. He nearly pulls off the present, however the abiding picture is of him in a lure door ready to be elevated onstage – on high of the world and but spiritually beneath floor.
In reality, that sums up Robbie Williams as a documentary. It’s a persuasive account of the gulf that may happen between wealth and happiness, a easy sentiment that may be tough to actually really feel. Like Robbie himself, the present’s imperfect and just a little insular, however its emotional pull is plain.
Details
- Director: Joe Pearlman
- Release date: November 8 (Netflix)
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