Michael Winterbottom made 24 Hour Party People the way Tony Wilson ran Factory Records: with too much ambition, not enough caution, and a gleeful willingness to let the whole thing fall apart in public. The film opens at the Sex Pistols' legendary 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall gig — the one where, allegedly, everyone who was there went on to start a band — and uses that single night as the ignition point for everything that followed: Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays, the Haçienda, and the slow, spectacular collapse of Factory Records itself. Steve Coogan plays Tony Wilson, the Granada TV presenter turned record-label impresario, and it is one of the sharpest pieces of performance casting in British cinema. Coogan's Wilson is simultaneously ridiculous and visionary — a man who quotes Boethius while signing contracts in his own blood and losing money on every record he releases. The film knows Wilson is absurd. Wilson knows Wilson is absurd. The joke is that the absurdity was the point. Winterbottom's method is deliberately unstable. He mixes archival footage, dramatic reconstruction, talking heads, and fourth-wall breaks into something that refuses to behave like a conventional music biopic. The supporting cast — Paddy Considine, Shirley Henderson, Andy Serkis, John Simm — orbits Coogan's Wilson without ever quite stabilising him. This is a film about a scene, not a man, and it treats historical fact with the same cheerful irreverence that Factory treated commercial viability. The 90s nostalgia cycle currently eating the culture tends to airbrush the decade's messiness into clean aesthetic. 24 Hour Party People resists that instinct entirely — partly because it's really about the 80s, and partly because Winterbottom is constitutionally uninterested in comfort. The Haçienda was a financial catastrophe. Factory Records went bankrupt. Joy Division's story ended in tragedy. The film holds all of this without flinching, and without turning the tragedy into sentiment. The timing of this re-release is interesting. Winterbottom is simultaneously preparing a fifth instalment of The Trip — The Trip to the Northern Lights, with Coogan and Rob Brydon eating their way through Scandinavia — which means the Coogan-Winterbottom axis remains as productive as ever. Seeing 24 Hour Party People in this context is a reminder of how that collaboration started: not with competitive Michael Caine impressions over a nice risotto, but with genuine formal ambition and a subject that deserved it. Twenty-four years on, what holds up is the film's honesty about the gap between myth-making and reality. Wilson mythologised Manchester music because he believed in it, not because he was cynical about it — and Winterbottom mythologises Wilson with the same double awareness. The 4K UHD release from 26 October will give the film a visual upgrade it probably doesn't need; this was always music you listened to, not a painting you looked at. But in cinemas from 9 October, on a proper sound system, it sounds exactly as good as it ever did.
