The lofty $110 million production charts the life and career of famous British pop star Robbie Williams, employing the cutting-edge Weta digital FX to represent Williams as a tuxedo-dressed monkey. While jarring and hard to accept from the onset,

“In real life I don’t cry that much,” Williams says and then smiles. “You have a (expletive) biography about you and have the world go, ‘I’ve seen you and heard you’ and come tell me how you deal with it.'”

For many Americans, director Michael Gracey’s kaleidoscopic portrait of the Brit-pop sensation’s career will double as an overdue introduction.