24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
1/2
Crash this party.
Running time: 117 minutes. Rated R (strong language, drug use and sexuality). At the Sunshine Cinema, Houston Street and Second Avenue.
MICHAEL Winterbottom’s cheerfully bonkers tribute to the hugely influential Manchester music scene is a great big bliss-bomb of nostalgia, great tunes and inspired lunacy.
Filmed documentary-style, it’s an ebullient mix of archival footage, re-creation and narration, taking us on a giddy ride from the burgeoning punk scene of the late 1970s through the ecstasy-fueled rave days of the early ’90s.
Clown prince of the Manc movement was Tony Wilson, a TV reporter turned impresario, who began by booking punk bands at a down-at-heel local nightclub, before starting his own record label, Factory – home of bands such as Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays – and opening the iconic nightclub Hacienda.
Wilson, impersonated brilliantly by the very droll British comedian Steve Coogan, acts as the movie’s guide, escorting us through a story he admits is often more legend than fact.
He’s a fascinating character, a very bad businessman who managed to seed the growth of a movement on the strength of his passion for music and for the grim, industrial city he called home.
Frank Cottrell Boyce’s clever, self-referential script has Wilson interrupting his narrative to let us know that a certain scene is symbolic, to point out cameos by the real players, explain his own behavior (“I’m being postmodern before there was a word for it”) and, at one point, insisting that “this story is not about me.”
Oh, but it is.
Even while we’re learning about the suicide of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis (Sean Harris), the wacky antics of Happy Mondays and their drug-addled singer Shaun Ryder (Danny Cunningham) and the mounting debts of the Hacienda and the dysfunctional Factory Records, the focus remains on Wilson.
He’s hilariously unflappable, spouting literary quotes and making wry asides to the camera, as he slowly goes broke and creates history at the same time.
This wonderful party of a movie, as totally original as its hero, stamps on a smiley face that will linger for hours.