Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People is less a biopic than a controlled demolition of the genre — a film that breaks the fourth wall so often it forgets there was one, and means it as a structural statement rather than a stylistic tic. Steve Coogan's Tony Wilson isn't played as a man so much as a phenomenon who knows he's being observed, which is accurate to Wilson himself: a Granada TV presenter who understood that performance and reality were interchangeable currencies, and spent twenty years arbitraging the difference. The film opens at the Sex Pistols' 1976 Free Trade Hall concert in Manchester — the gig famously attended by perhaps forty people, all of whom went on to form bands — and never stops treating history with that same combination of reverence and comedy. Wilson compares the audience to Christ's apostles, on camera, with a wink. This is the film's tonal register throughout: semi-serious hagiography delivered by a man aware it's hagiography. It should be exhausting. Somehow it isn't. Coogan's performance is the load-bearing wall. The Partridgean delivery — every line pitched slightly toward an invisible studio audience — works precisely because Wilson was that kind of person: the regional TV presenter who believed, correctly, that he was operating on a larger stage than anyone around him could see. The performance doesn't humanise Wilson so much as it explains him, and the film is honest enough to let that explanation be unsettling. The scene at Ian Curtis's funeral, where Wilson hustles journalist Simon Pegg over the open coffin, is the film's moral centre of gravity: Wilson gains nothing financial, loses nothing emotional, and the film refuses to adjudicate on whether that makes him a visionary or a vampire. The supporting cast does sharp work in compressed space. Sean Harris's Ian Curtis is stark and angular in a way that Sam Riley's more empathetic turn in Anton Corbijn's Control (2007) deliberately isn't — both readings are defensible, and the contrast says something real about what you prioritise when you tell this story. Andy Serkis as Martin Hannett, Lennie James as Alan Erasmus, and a brilliantly cast Peter Kay as the lairy club owner all inhabit the film's loose, documentary-adjacent energy without straining for significance. The real-world cameos — Howard Devoto disputing his fictionalised fling with Wilson's wife — are the film at its most Sterne-ian: fiction corrected in real time by the people it fictionalises. The music is handled in an unusually restrained way: kept diegetic, left in the background, never weaponised for emotional manipulation. Another director would have used Joy Division and New Order as mood artillery. Winterbottom refuses, which is formally interesting and occasionally dramatically frustrating. The film's casualness about its own greatest hits — the Factory catalogue is just furniture here — is either its most radical choice or its most significant flaw, and twenty-four years on it still reads as genuinely undecided. The original review apparently found the tone too flippant, too formless — as if a rough assembly had been released by mistake. That reading has aged out. What felt like absence now reads as precision: the film's refusal to tell you when to feel things is its argument. Wilson built Factory Records on a similar refusal — no contracts, no commercial calculation, no artistic compromise, and eventual financial collapse. The film is built on the same principles. It earns its own chaos. At twenty-four years old, 24 Hour Party People sits in an odd critical position: not quite a cult film, not quite a mainstream favourite, more like a shared reference point for everyone who's ever wondered what it looks like when someone with genuine taste and catastrophic business instincts runs an institution entirely on belief. That's a real and specific thing to be, and very few films have managed it.
