I'll go out on a limb here: 24 Hour Party People is one of the better rock 'n' roll movies of the last few decades. But then again, I'm biased.
24 Hour Party People is the definitive movie — make that the only movie — about the punk/post-punk explosion that shook up Manchester, England, during the late '70s and early '80s. For the record, it's a scene with which I'm on fairly intimate terms.
I was a big fan of many of the bands of that time and place, and spent some quality time in Manchester clubs during the latter part of that era, both as an observer and a participant. At the risk of sounding like I'm dropping names (which I am), I was even once upon a time a house guest of Mark E. Smith, ringleader of the seminal Manchester band The Fall, who acted as my tour guide to the city. And when New Order played their first U.S. show (at shoebox-size Maxwell's in Hoboken, N.J.), I was standing right up front, close enough to see that the band's amplifiers and guitar cases were still stamped with the name they had been known by until just recently, Joy Division. Ian Curtis, the band's former lead singer, had hanged himself only a few weeks earlier.
There's a huge amount of pop culture history wrapped up in 24 Hour Party People, although you don't necessarily need to know squat about any of it to still get an enormous kick out of the movie. For almost anyone lucky (or old) enough to have actually grown up with this music — or better yet, to have lived it — it's hard to imagine the film being anything other than irresistible.
Like all the best rock 'n' roll movies, 24 Hour Party People is a veritable perpetual-motion machine — sly, savagely self-mocking and always quick on its feet. Fast and furious and utterly unafraid of taking the piss out of itself, the film puts a very personalized spin on that familiar rise-and-fall story of a person/place/thing that blooms in the promise of unbounded creativity and then degenerates into empty-headed excess.
Director Michael Winterbottom wisely structures the movie around the twin poles of the introspective and still influential Joy Division and the more upbeat, bankable, but ultimately inane and forgettable (not to mention self-destructive) Happy Mondays. Both bands were doomed, of course, as was the scene itself, but the devil, as we all know, is in the details.
Winterbottom attaches a human face to the story in the form of real-life rock impresario/journalist Tony Wilson (wonderfully played by Steve Coogan), a bastion of droll wit who serves as our guide into the fray. Wilson propels himself and us through each sequence, looking straight at the camera as he introduces the bands and individual personalities that drive the action, explains what's going on behind the scenes, and provides crucial background info as well as just plain dirt. The movie thrives on gossip as much as on historical fact, and, to its great credit, it delights in consistently confusing the two. In the ultimate expression of this whimsically seditious approach, we eventually witness Wilson's wife having revenge-sex in a toilet stall with Buzzcocks/Magazine frontman Howard Devoto, as a bathroom attendant who turns out to be the real Devoto (now blandly middle-aged) informs us that the notorious coupling never actually happened. No matter, chimes in the ever-helpful Mr. Wilson himself, who's in perfect agreement with John Ford's famous line that, "When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend."
Wilson not only gives the movie its human face, but also its narrative arc — although, as he rightfully tells us, "I'm a minor character in my own story." (It's true, in that this really isn't a movie about any one character, so much as a love letter to an entire city and the music that it spawned.) Wilson, whose life was changed when he experienced an early performance by the Sex Pistols, is on screen almost constantly, but he's really just a conduit through which all the chaotic energy in the movie flows and finally finds something like a form.
24 Hour Party People provides a short history of punk rock simply by detailing Wilson's efforts to promote his favorite bands, first by talking them up on the television show he hosts, and then booking them in his fledging nightclub and, eventually, signing them to his record label. When Wilson's life begins to go down the toilet, so does the scene, and there's a goodly amount of symbiotic activity between the two.
Besides Wilson, the only individual character of whom we get a real, palpable sense is Ian Curtis, the intense and monumentally tortured Joy Division frontman whose tragically short life would've made a fascinating movie all by itself. Actor Sean Harris captures Curtis' haunted interior and painfully awkward physicality and gives him a presence that's hard to watch but impossible not to.
There's a look of death in the guy's eyes from the get-go, and, while there are some amusing moments with Curtis depicted here as well, the movie doesn't cheat on the fact that ol' Ian wasn't exactly the most fun guy on the block. We only get snippets of music from all the other bands in 24 Hour Party People, but we're treated to entire slabs of beautifully gloomy Joy Division pop tunes like "She's Lost Control" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart." It doesn't take much reading between the lines to decipher the film's take on this band's critical position in the once and former Manchester scheme of things, and beyond.
The movie seems to lose a bit of its soul when Curtis kills himself, but that's probably intentional, since that's exactly what happened to the Manchester scene too. Joy Division morphed into New Order and made fistfuls of money (unfettered by the angst of their former singer), and Wilson started a slick new club called The Hacienda, where the stars were the DJs, not the bands (an early prototype of rave culture).
The most popular band of the moment was Happy Mondays, a drug-addled lot of talentless wankers who exactly emulated the patterns of the dinosaur bands they professed to detest. Ironically, as the brighter, fluffier pop sounds of Happy Mondays begins to take over 24 Hour Party People, the movie becomes darker and darker.
Expertly blending archival footage of seminal bands from the '70s and '80s with cleverly shot modern simulations, the film mixes all sorts of mediums in an effort to create "live" performances that feel totally authentic within the parameters of the movie's own nudge-nudge-wink-wink universe. Many of the cut-and-paste techniques used here obviously owe a thing or two to — sorry, but it's got to be said — postmodernism and its ilk, but it's all much too joyful, too spontaneous and purely entertaining to really be considered pure pomo.
Unlike the works of so many modern cinematic provocateurs or a movie by somebody like, say, Oliver Stone, 24 Hour Party People isn't just sending up flares in order to call attention to itself. In its way, it all seems somewhat more honest, more genuine than that, as if Winterbottom was trying, beyond all the playful screwing around, to tie everything together, to forge all the disparate elements into a single piece of visual and dramatic storytelling.
Along the way, there are some great, gratuitously goofy moments and a small army of wonderfully colorful characters, most of whom actually existed. We get Shawn Ryder, the unpredictable junkie fruitcake singer of Happy Mondays, as well as the safari-outfit clad A Certain Ratio, a less-than original group described as "Joy Division with better clothes." Then there's Martin Hannett, the brilliant, behemoth-proportioned sound-sculptor whose eccentric methods and borderline psychotic behavior recall that of another legendary producer, Phil Spector. And when things begin to slow down for a second or two, you can be sure to expect a surreal sequence in which the heavens part and God Himself appears, or hundreds of poisoned pigeons inexplicably begin dropping from the skies. It's that kind of movie.
From Welcome to Sarajevo to Wonderland to The Claim, Michael Winterbottom has never made the same film twice, and 24 Hour Party People is one of his best. Besides Howard Devoto, the movie is filled with fascinating cameos by real-life Manchester personalities (including one by my old pal Mark E.), and brims over with juicy little insider jokes. This is no elitist project, though: All the inside references are eventually explained and the uncredited cameos credited. Eventually, our erstwhile narrator even alerts us to the fact that there are quite a few more cameos that we didn't get to see, in scenes that wound up on the proverbial cutting room floor. Not to worry, though, he tells us in the film's final mutinous moments. "I'm sure it'll all be on the DVD."
Editor's note: As you could guess, compiling our annual Best of the Bay issue requires moving gargantuan amounts of information. Unfor-tunately, one winner was inadvertently consigned to the cutting-room floor. Here it is, a week late:
BEST INDEPENDENT VIDEO STOREIt's been a big year for Video Mayhem. Tampa's best (and nearly last) independent video store is doing respectable rental business, but where things are really going gangbusters is with people coming in and just buying DVDs right off the shelves, particularly the Asian horror and action movies in which the store unofficially specializes. The really big news, though, is that owner Stephen Biro has recently teamed up with a silent partner or two to manufacture and distribute his own line of DVD titles. In keeping with Video Mayhem's rather, uh, unique sensibilities (the store is officially rated R, and no one under 17 is allowed through the door unless accompanied by an adult), the new DVD line will feature the most unusual, obscure and occasionally shocking films that Biro can get his hands on. First up was an uncut, uncensored DVD edition of Guinea Pig, a legendary series of ultra-gory splatterfests so unsettling and realistic that they caused a scandal some time back when actor Charlie Sheen stumbled upon one and thought he'd unearthed a real live snuff film. Video Mayhem plans to follow this up in the coming year with extras-laden DVDs of the acclaimed Japanese zombie opus Junk and a few other Asian goodies targeted at folks with wide-open minds. Beyond that, Video Mayhem keeps chuggin' away, and the shelves at Biro's little Ybor store are jam-packed with brand new titles just begging to be rented or bought. Store hours are 2-10 p.m. Mon.-Wed., 2-11 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., closed Sunday.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2002.