'24 Hour Party People'

Pills, thrills, and bellyaches

THINK OF ROCK'S legacies and it's impossible not to pay lip service to record labels like Sun Studios, Chess Records, Motown, Stax/Volt, and Sub Pop. One name you never hear mentioned among rock's Olympian patron saints, however, is Factory. The Manchester-based label gave the world Joy Division, the Happy Mondays, and the seeds of rave culture via its sister club Hacienda and was renowned as much for its owners' bad business sense and drug-fueled burnout as for its stark, minimalist sound. 24 Hour Party People seems destined to cement the collective's rightful place in the pantheon, but any notion of genuflection or pedestal polishing quickly gets pissed on. Laden with one of the cinema's most unreliable narrators in the form of TV personality-Factory impresario Tony Wilson (Steve "Alan Partridge" Coogan) and brimming with pop art detritus filmmaking (punky Super 8 comfortably cuddles with druggy D.V.), the film is less concerned with facts than with Factory's mythos as a beautiful supernova failure. Director Michael Winterbottom (Wonderland) incorporates Lester-like giddiness, deconstructive asides, and even actual participants from the era (keep an eye out for Mark E. Smith and Howard DeVoto) to correct the film when it "gets it wrong"; realizing any history is subjective, Winterbottom and Coogan continually remind the audience point blank not to take anything on-screen as gospel. One wishes that Manchester itself, the industrial wasteland whose environment was vital to fostering the label's role in the modern zeitgeist, had emerged as a more prominent character and that some narrative strands had garnered more attention (whither New Order's rise?), but any glitches are overrun by the film's gleeful willingness to jettison narrative and biopic concerns in order to hook viewers on a feeling. (David Fear)