Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: Music makes the ‘People’ come together

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 9:05 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

The other night I caught an episode of "The Simpsons," in which Homer tried to pull some sort of emotional blackmail on his boss. Ultimately he came out ahead, but Marge nonetheless tried to find a moral to the convoluted story. Homer balked: "There isn't a moral. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened."

Wholly unintentionally, that simple statement explains why movies about popular music stars are often incomprehensible. Either the lives of musicians are too convoluted to make a self-contained story ("Backbeat," "The Buddy Holly Story"), or they aren't interesting enough to fill a 90-minute film ("Selena").

There's a good reason so many musicians connect with "This is Spinal Tap." In the process of going for complete parody, Rob Reiner and his cohorts came closest to painting an accurate picture of the music industry without surpassing it.

For every album-art mishap, every "Stonehenge" in "Spinal Tap," there's a corresponding real-life rock story that's even more absurd.

The film "24 Hour Party People" (MGM DVD, $26.98) tells a few of those unbelievable stories. Manchester, England's "Madchester" scene really happened, and Michael Winterbottom's sloppy but exhilarating film doesn't sugarcoat it.

Joy Division singer Ian Curtis killed himself on the eve of the band's first U.S. tour (and galvanized his fame in doing so). Shaun and Paul Ryder of Happy Mondays fed poison to nearly 3,000 pigeons one afternoon.

What the film doesn't do is tie these disparate events -- beginning in 1976 with an underattended Sex Pistols show and ending with the closing of the world-famous Hacienda nightclub in 1992 -- to a cohesive whole.

Winterbottom knew going in that it wasn't possible, so he did the next best thing: cast Factory Records head Tony Wilson (played by comedian Steve Coogan) as the center of that chaotic universe.

And it works. Wilson, a journalist and bon vivant, was a lightning rod for Manchester's wild electricity; he was at the Pistols gig, signed Joy Division (which later became New Order) and Happy Mondays to his label, and operated a disco that birthed rave culture.

Coogan knows he's playing an icon, and keeps Wilson cool even as the film mocks him as a Svengali figure. He talks to the camera, freely admitting when the film strays from the historical record.

(One terrific scene has two characters having sex in a lavatory. Winterbottom zips past them to one of the characters' real-life counterpart, playing a janitor. He addresses the camera: "I definitely don't remember this happening.")

The DVD gives the real-life Wilson his own commentary track to right the wrongs, but he has surprisingly few caveats. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

He is largely complimentary to the film, even though it makes him look like a first-class jerk at times. Wilson knows that "24 Hour Party People" is really about the music, and appreciates that sacrifices had to be made to tie it all together.

It's not as entertaining as "Spinal Tap" (which it inadvertently resembles), but that's fine. You can't argue with the music, and "24 Hour Party People" does all it can to put all that great music in one context, even if the truth suffered a bit.

Coogan admits as much when he quotes John Ford: "When you have to choose between truth and legend, print the legend." Winterbottom's film makes the right choices.