24 Hour Party People (2002)

Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People concerns Tony Wilson, a Granada television presenter who attends a Sex Pistols gig in 1976 and spends the next sixteen years turning that evening into a record label, a nightclub, and a series of financial catastrophes. Steve Coogan plays him as a man narrating his own legend directly into the camera, correcting the record, then admitting the record was invented. Real concert footage sits beside staged scenes. A Buzzcocks member turns to the lens to deny an affair the film has just shown him having. The result is a biography that keeps winking at its own unreliability.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is largely disinterested. Lennie James appears as Alan Erasmus, a genuine Factory co-founder, and the film treats his presence as simple fact, offering no commentary on race and no interest in racial politics. Factory's artist-first ethos gets a warm glow: contracts signed in blood, full creative control surrendered to the musicians, a hit single that loses five pence per copy because the sleeve costs more than the record. This is a critique of the commercial music business, though it amounts to nostalgia for a doomed business model, not a program for redistribution.

The absences are thorough. The Manchester scene was a boys' club, and the film depicts it as such without apology or correction. No environmental themes intrude on the ecstasy and the gang violence at the Haçienda. Ian Curtis's epilepsy is presented as a medical tragedy, not an identity. Nobody is lectured. Nobody is improved. The film's only sermon concerns the dignity of signing bad deals for good records, and even that arrives with a shrug and a vision of God on a rooftop.