The best way to recount what happened at a party isn’t to tell a story about it; it’s to throw a similar party and invite people to that. So the lesson is: if you want to tell people the story of the last night of the Hacienda, you need to host the last night of the Hacienda, and film that. Logical? When did logic play a part in Factory Records?
24 Hour Party People, a lodestone for Manchester music, is a movie which told the story of Tony Wilson, Ian Curtis and Shaun Ryder. Or did it? What sort of movie is 24HPP?
It’s a biopic with a fleeting, flirting, disrespectful relationship with fact, truth and accuracy. It could be said it treats its three subjects at best with disdain and mockery, and at worst with a level of respect just not fitting. This is to miss the point though as 24HPP isn’t really a biopic of three people. It is not a Classic Rock article.
So if not a biopic, what then? In the Empire top 100 British movies, they refer to the movie as a comedy. It isn’t. It’s funny, very funny, and has well written lines. But being funny doesn’t make a movie a comedy. 24HPP is a mirror image of life. Life isn’t a comedy, but has funny things in it.
So what is it? 24HPP is a love story. Although they might be the central characters, the movie is not about Wilson, Curtis and Ryder. It is about music, friendship and drugs, and the love generated when those three elements join. It’s the love of a city, that found itself for a time, as the cultural hub of the world, until Oasis took too much coke. The movie ends on a roof with friends sat around chatting, passing a spliff. They know they have done special things but not the how or why. It’s the real Wilson’s fave scene. Wilson knew what it was about.
When Control rolled around in 2007 it seemed to offer the “serious” retelling of the story. But its black and white ornate vision is so curated and stylised it reduces the story to the level of a chocolate box historical. Control treats its subjects like stars: cold, distant and frigid. Only 5 years separated the two movies but it might as well be a life time. Control feels as distant from Joy Division as Shakespeare felt from Caesar. Control is happy touching from a distance. Control is content to tell the story of the myth of Joy Division.
As Wilson himself always said: “trust the art, not the artist”, in following Wilson’s advice, 24 Hour Party People acts as embodiment of what he stood for, a piece of art, as flawed as most of the artists he championed.
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