If you take care to use the same facial rig across all your models, then yes. And you’ll also be able to retarget and re-use them on slightly different skeletal meshes.
Just make sure to have the bones facing the correct way to begin with, or animate the proper rig directly.
The helmet works great for avoiding twist/angle issues. The motion controller idea is great to preserve the head bone rotations, however getting that data to a bone isn’t easy.
as a quick fix for that, maybe a kinect would be more helpful.