24 Hour Party People
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
Sentimentalizing British punk culture would take back every emotional and musical advance that made it exciting. 24 Hour Party People avoids this pitfall?the usual trap of films that attempt to immortalize a pop music trend?by offering a wonderfully impious look back at the indie label Factory Records begun by Manchester native, tv-celeb Tony Wilson. The film's great impudence is confirmed in the scene introducing Wilson's damaged, yet favored artists Shaun and Paul Ryder of the band Happy Mondays. On a Manchester rooftop, the two longhaired, slacker brothers feed rat poison to 3000 pesky pigeons. An aerial shot timed to "Ride of the Valkyries" circles the stoned and giggling louts as they wait for a shit storm of their own making. This combined mischief, inflated egotism and nihilism is simultaneously exhilarating and appalling?a Werner Herzog epiphany. It's also true to punk.
Apparently, it's also true to Wilson, the class-climbing businessman who had the effrontery?and wit?to bring anarchic integrity to the movement's early days. In 1976 he created Factory Records as a 50/50 cooperative and signed artists to a contract written in his own blood. I dare say not even Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy was this rigorous a piece of mythologizing, given its ultimate fantasy of love amidst failure and dysfunction. Director Michael Winterbottom isn't half the artist Cox is, but through inspired collaboration with cinematographer Robby Muller and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, 24 Hour Party People imparts Wilson's elusive foolishness and optimism, evoking the spirit of youthful audacity but also being honest about its rough edges.
As impersonated by tall, avuncular Steve Coogan, Wilson is shown in an original, balanced characterization. He possesses Oxford-educated arrogance, tv-newsreader glibness and street-level humility. (First seen doing a BBC segment on hang-gliding, Wilson says his life story feels like Icarus': "If you get the reference, great. If you don't, it doesn't matter but you should probably read more.") Willing to show himself the butt, as well as the facilitator, of Manchester's rude, ambitious rockers, Wilson describes his entrepreneurial drive as "an excess of civic pride." He's always moving up but, as his scientific analogy for music culture goes ("The history of popular music is a double helix?one form is always ascending and another's always descending"), he's also always brought back to Manchester's grungy, working-class, industrial truth. He's a trustworthy guide to the punk, postpunk and later-coming rave scenes (virtually a creation of Factory's Hacienda disco), precisely because he calls himself an unreliable narrator. Though not so unreliable he denies Factory's part in Manchester's later drugs-and-guns social calamity.
Embracing different points of view, Wilson and 24 Hour Party People mixes politics and culture with a DJ's adroitness. He can refer to the Situationists, and "the free play of signs" that infatuated punks' artsy-Marxists, yet his own class-conscious Mancunian fondness leans toward the hedonistic, groove-based Happy Mondays and its junkie lead singer/lyricist Sean Ryder: "Ryder is on a par with Yeats as a poet," Wilson boasts. His wife shoots back, "That's funny, because everybody else thinks he's a fucking idiot."
Chockablock with opinions and personalities, 24 Hour Party People hurtles along like no other British-made film I can think of. (Floyd Mutrux's American Hot Wax and Richard Lowenstein's Dogs in Space are the closest equivalents.) It's got the heterogeneous, low-down-yet-inspired rock 'n' roll spirit. Shirley Henderson plays Wilson's first wife Lindsay; the gifted Paddy Considine plays Factory cofounder and hothead Rob Gretton; and Lennie James plays third partner Alan Erasmus. Uncannily well-chosen actors represent identical young versions of New Order, the Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio, et al., and they bump shoulders with some of the actual, now-aged musicians doing cameo appearances, adding to the movie's pop-never-dies tumult. The music's great, of course, and thoughtfully used (as when an unfaithful Wilson makes up with Lindsay while listening to the discordant sounds of Joy Division). Plus, Winterbottom's style is consistently, appropriately mocking and experimental.
From the credit sequence's tie-dyed titles, 24 Hour Party People pays homage to punk's DIY esthetic. But this conceit only works because the film employs extremely sophisticated techniques. Winterbottom, Muller and Boyce honor the era by bringing out its essence. Wilson dates the start of Manchester punk with a local performance by the Sex Pistols. "Only 42 people were in attendance but that's more than the Last Supper," he says, pointing out the audience of future postpunk stars. Vintage footage of Johnny Rotten singing "No Fun" is ingeniously intercut with Muller's 16 mm recreation of the sparse, pogo-ing listeners; some are inspired (like Wilson), others agog but the juxtaposed film stock and differing grains (including video) effectively blend history and memory and degrees of tasteful appreciation. The historic moment is almost visible, nearly tactile.
Video's raw imagery works in documentary context and in this collage some is quite fine. 24 Hour Party People uses the best semidocumentary artifice since Gordon Willis' work on Woody Allen's Zelig. When Joy Division comes into its own (after trial appearances under the names Stiff Kittens and Warsaw), Muller captures their moment of glory in vibrant b&w. Sean Harris, who plays the band's late vocalist Ian Curtis, has a David Byrne-like skeletal appearance but sings "Love Will Tear Us Apart" with palsied vehemence. He's enigmatic, perhaps not dramatized enough, but photographed and performed so as to etch a memorable portrait. In Curtis' first scene, he advances on Wilson, calling him "cunt" for not featuring the band on Wilson's local tv show So It Goes. Wilson later describes Curtis as "a prophet of urban decay and alienation"?overblown yet Harris' image and performance suggest some powerful dissatisfaction beneath Manchester's ordinary surface. Even in brief, his moodiness adds intensity; there's none of that Almost Famous mawkishness about rock solidarity but a bracing recognition of the culture's recklessness, anonymity and danger.
Curtis' suicide seems affectedly staged even if accurate (his feet dangle while a tv plays Werner Herzog's Stroszek), yet the followup is amazing: Wilson does a tv tribute in which a fully dressed old-time Town Crier announces Curtis' obituary. It feels like a responsible, caring and fitting way to give a pop renegade his due. Wilson ushers Curtis into tradition with unexpected and satisfying grandiloquence, like seeing the Notorious B.I.G. eulogized by a gospel preacher. It's a loved one's due that also winks at our shared cultural pomposity. In a sober scene where Wilson views Curtis' body, he comments, "That is the musical equivalent of Che Guevara"?a statement that is provocatively overblown. It sizes up rock mythology and cinches its portentousness. (Yet Wilson doesn't leave out the greatest Manchester group of all. God comes to him out of the clouds to let him know.)
Almost everything Wilson says throughout 24 Hour Party People should be taken with a smile. He's a charmingly informed raconteur about changing styles ("They're applauding the DJ, the medium, the beatification of the beat. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing") yet he maintains the pop-loving polyglot's common touch. "Mutability is our tragedy but it's also our hope," he quotes. And midway through the film he quotes Fitzgerald on American lives not having second acts, then pushes the narrative forward: "This is Manchester; we do things differently here. This is the second act."
Before Factory Records closes, the movie fully conveys the culture's uproarious risks. It's fortunate that Wilson favors Happy Mondays (named after the profits Factory made on New Order's "Blue Monday"); he admits they're "fucking wankers but with a great rhythm section" and this allows the movie to indulge more sensual delights, more perspective, than would a self-congratulatory (tony?) emphasis on the clearly superior New Order.
Muller shoots Happy Mondays' tour bus interior letting sunlight flood in from the pink-tinted windows, and onstage Bez does his sexy-freaky shuffle-dance while Shaun Ryder and soul sister Rowetta sing within an E-induced rainbow of pure light: he's in purple shade, his face yellow and his hair red. A Happy Mondays album cover come to life.