Starring: Steve Coogan, Ralf Little, Shirley Henderson, Peter Kay
Director: Michael Winterbottom
The film: Neither a docudrama nor rockumentary, 24 Hour Party People is an intelligent - if deeply flawed - blurred-reality account of the hedonistic Manchester music scene from the days of punk through to the Ecstasy-fuelled days of 'Madchester' and acid house. It's an ambitious sweep which director Michael Winterbottom undertakes by using Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda nightlcub, as the pivotal character.
Wilson - played adroitly by Steve Coogan as a more pompous, cutting version of his most famous comic alter ego Alan Partridge - is a great choice. The Cambridge graduate and dissatisfied local TV reporter pushed punk in the northeast of England after seeing an epochal Sex Pistols gig in 1976.
This gig is where the story begins and whizzes through 15 years in which Wilson's Factory Records launched Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays, and started the Hacienda, Britain's seminal club which saw the DJ replace the rock star and the rise of a new drug culture.
It's a giddy story and the film shows Wilson both as innovative pioneer and as a generally despised human being. For all his success, Wilson never gained street-cred. Coogan extracts maximum humour in the part, which offsets the tragedies and downsides of the incestuous scene; Ian Curtis' suicide, druggang slayings and the tendency of key players to waste musical talent through excess.