Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 19, 2002
Guided tour of a music movement
24 Hour Party People (Rated R; drug use, nudity, profanity, mature themes) (117 minutes) -- Two hours with the self-consciously trendy dance rock of Happy Mondays, New Order, its predecessor Joy Division and the like would be two hours too much. Neither the music nor the personalities of those bands, which sprang from Manchester, England, in the 1980s, are all that compelling, or, as it turns out, as influential as once thought.
So it's a good thing that the focus of 24 Hour Party People, an intermittently entertaining snapshot of a once-fertile music scene, is a behind-the-scenes guy, a stylish, intelligent, overly self-confident impresario named Tony Wilson. Steve Coogan (a British television personality), giving one of the cheekiest, funniest performances of the season, plays Wilson with aplomb and great good humor.
But it's best not to take Wilson at face value, particularly when he breaks the narrative, as he does frequently, to speak directly to the camera. During an opening sequence, Wilson, who pays the bills as a chatty television newscaster, shows his TV viewers the fun and folly of hang gliding. He then pointedly tells the film audience that the sequence hints at his future endeavors: "You'll be seeing a lot more of that kind of thing in the film."
Later, Wilson makes another suspect statement. "I'm a minor character in my own story."
Thankfully, he's not, and we view the rise and fall of the Manchester scene -- including a pivotal Sex Pistols performance, the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, the antics of the Happy Mondays -- through the eyes of the ambitious, erudite Wilson. Without the guy, apparently, the scene might never have exploded: He provided a common meeting ground, in the form of the Hacienda, a cavernous rave club that opened in 1982 and shut down a decade later because of poor liquor sales (patrons were doing ecstasy instead) and the intrusion of gangster violence.
Wilson also started a label, Factory Records, along with his pal Alan Erasmus (Lennie James) and band manager Rob Gretton (Paddy Considine).
Wilson's business endeavors tanked, in part because of his emphasis on boosterism at the expense of sober financial management; he never signed contracts with his bands. The result is an appealing story, complete with a larger-than-life character driven by obsessions other than greed. The music gets old pretty quickly, but Wilson's story, told by director Michael Winterbottom (The Claim, Jude) with a mix of digital video and newsreel footage, verges on fascinating. B