24 Hour Party People poster & wallpaper

Andy Serkis, Chris Coghill, Danny Cunningham

Spanning from the 1970's to early 1990's, this is the story of the Manchester music scene... Tony Wilson is an ambitious but frustrated local TV news reporter looking for a way to make his mark. After...( read more  read more... ) witnessing a life-changing concert by an unknown band called the Sex Pistols, he persuades his station to televise one of their performances, and soon Manchester's punk groups are clamoring for him to manage them. Riding the wave of a musical revolution, Wilson and his friends create the legendary Factory Records and the Hacienda Club, and bands like Joy Division, New Order, and the Happy Mondays emerge to change the industry forever.

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86% liked it

29,979 ratings

Critics

85% liked it

96 critics

R, 1 hr. 57 min.

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom

Release Date: August 9, 2002

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DVD Release Date: January 21, 2003

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Andy Serkis and Paddy Considine 24 Hour Party People Andy Serkis as Martin Hannett As Martin Hannett The Hacienda Andy Serkis Tony Wilson 24 Hour Party People 24 Hour Party People
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Flixster Reviews (1,739)

  • SirPant
    September 24, 2009
    SirPant
    An interesting film based on Madchester in the early 90?s. Fact and fiction go hand in hand but the visualization of some of the industry?s best and funniest rumours make it worthwhile viewing. The suicide scene was also handled very tastefully.
  • binky013
    August 28, 2008
    binky013
    I've been cogitating on this little gem for a while, not quite sure how best to say what I want to say about it. If you surf reviews and comments about it, you'll notice that the word "comedy" crops up quite a bit. Granted, there are many very funny moments in the film, but ove...( read more)rall, I'd have to place this in the tragedy camp.

    First and foremost, the story of the protagonist, Tony Wilson, played brilliantly by Steve Coogan, and the whole blazing birth and soaring decline of the punk rock movement, follows the arc of classic tragedy. Wilson begins as a Manchester TV personality, fosters the Punk Rock era, enjoying incredible wealth and fame, and then ends as he began, the Manchester TV personality. Along the way there is excess -- drinking, drugs, sex -- and we are left with a man a bit more drug infused and enthused than he appears to have been at the start. The very last line of the film is a comment on the great quality of the marijuana being smoked. Coogan, in one of many meta-moments sprinkled throughout, lays it out for us near the very beginning: It's the flight of Icarus. An archetypal tragic trajectory, both figuratively and literally. As Coogan says, need he say more.

    Trust me, I am no puritan, and I've lived my share of 24-hour partying. But there is a difference in the kind of indulgence level exhibited by many of the characters here. Either it is recreational and you walk away from it as you choose, or it becomes an ingrained lifestyle that lends itself, as it does here, to deaths along the way.

    And therein lies the tragedy. Forget just the punk rock scene. Think of the music you love most. Whatever it may be. Or just think of movie stars. How many of these talented people must we lose to drugs? Will it ever end? Probably not. And there goes another Jimi Hendrix, another Janis Joplin, or another River Phoenix. Why?

    For me, this story is one that is told too often time and again. It's a neverending tragedy that can't seem to be stopped. Either a drug-related or at least a drug-complicated death juggernaut.

    All this being said, there are great moments of comedy, as mentioned, most happily generated as Wilson's Cambridge educational background gives rise to clever comments about classic literature and philosophy coming up against a seemingly much less educated real world around him. Maybe we all should, as Wilson/Coogan quips, read more : )
  • RCCLBC
    July 11, 2008
    RCCLBC
    It's funny...even if you are like me and your teen / early adult life was immersed in much of the music of this period and over the years you've heard about 'Factory Records" and 'The Hacienda'...you can't really appreciate ANY of it until you see a film like this and get a true ...( read more)feeling for everything and everyone that was involved.

    Some say Tony Wilson was a fool...while others say he was brilliant. I tend to think he was a little of both (aren't most geniuses?).

    The thing that CAN NOT be denied is Tony Wilson's innovative and vital role, not only in the "Manchester Music Scene" but in the music industry as a whole.

    I can not help but think of how amazing the music industry might have become, if his "vision" had not been tainted by the harsh reality of human nature.

    Now-a-days it takes an artist "breaking free" and doing it ALL themselves (see NIN, Radiohead) to have true creative freedom. Tony was offering that years ago at Factory Records, but ironically it was one of his "artists" (and bad money management in general) that ultimately ended it all.

    But his "vision" was pure and his passion for music was genuine. A truely great story about a really amazing man.
  • EarthlyAlien
    March 27, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    Tony Wilson: "June 4th, 1976. The Sex Pistols play Manchester for the very first time. There are only 42 people in the audience... but every single one is feeding on a power, an energy and a magic. lnspired, they will go out and perform wondrous deeds. For instance, Howard Dev...( read more)oto, at the front, Pete Shelley, at the back. They organised this gig. They're way ahead of everyone in Manchester. They're already the Buzzcocks. Howard later sleeps with my wife. Behind me are Stiff Kittens. Soon to become Warsaw,
    later to become Joy Division... finally to become New Order. That's John the Postman. He's... a postman. And that guy dancing at the front, that's Martin Hannett... the only bona fide genius
    in this story. Well, one of the only two bona fide geniuses in this story. He will later try to kill me."

    Photobucket

    It feels as if we've waited an eternity for 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom's glorious 'mocku-feature' about Manchester and its "mad music" sound of the 1980s. Released in the UK in April 2002, 24 Hour Party People is Winterbottom's Almost Famous, his love letter to Manchester and the post-punk revolution that made that city the place anyone wanted to be, that he and producer Andrew Eaton brainstormed while avoiding the cold climes of Canada during the shoot of their last film, The Claim (2000). 24 Hour People wasn't just worth the wait, it was a dream come true.

    24 Hour Party People, named after an early Happy Mondays song, is an irreverent piece to say the least. A biopic of sorts, the film's creators (including scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce) do all they can to tear down the inflated genre. Almost functioning as two films in one, 24 Hour Party People is based around the life and times of the still very alive Granada TV reporter Tony Wilson, one of the chaotic architects behind the famed Hacienda Night Club and influential music label Factory Records.

    The parallel film is of course about the music itself. The bands and individuals featured in 24 Hour Party People (whether they were there or not sometimes) range from major, world-changing bands like Joy Division and their later incarnation New Order, to the Happy Mondays, the Duritti Column, The Fall, The Buzzcocks, manager Rob Gretton, Howard Devoto, Bernard Sumner and producer Martin Hannett, made eccentric and troll-like by an actor who seems to specialise in trolls these days, Andy Serkis ("Gollum" in Lord of the Rings).

    After Wilson kicks off the proceedings with a madly funny recreation of a hang-gliding story for local Manchester TV, we veer straight into the Sex Pistols' first Manchester gig in 1976, where straight-to-camera again, Coogan's Wilson informs us that this is "where it all began" for the Manchester sound. Forty-seven people attended the gig (including "Tony the Postman"), though its inspiration proved infinite for the area. The film all but implodes around 1992, the year that Wilson and his associates ran out of money and closed the Hacienda, one of the acknowledged foundations of England's rave culture.

    Winterbottom, Boyce, and Coogan all grew up in the "Madchester" scene, so the story is as much theirs, as fans, as it is the bands' or the film's mouthpiece, Wilson. Boyce could have waxed elegiac, mourning the loss of an era, or nostalgic in recalling the music so integral to his youth - which he still does, particularly in the tribute to Ian Curtis and the recreation of his suicide. But he eschews both, choosing, instead, to celebrate the Factory with absurd, ironic humour and a screenplay that breaks through the fourth wall for Wilson's constant asides to the audience (with dialogues such as "this scene didn't actually make it to the final cut. I'm sure it'll be on the DVD"). Winterbottom and cinematographer Robby Muller complement Boyce's script in grungy, hand-held, digital-video style that both lends the story a sense of immediacy and echoes Manchester's industrial milieu. You literally feel as if you're actually there.

    Anybody who has ever experienced comedian/actor Steve Coogan's character Alan Partridge is sure to find a lot of that creation in his portrayal here of Tony Wilson, the irony being that said character was in part actually inspired by the guy in the first place. His performance is that kind of glue which keeps things vaguely adherent to some semblance of plot here is quite sublime, helped out no end by a not particularly big name, but no less talented because of it, supporting cast all faced with a rather lofty challenge - portraying an array of people all well-known, many of whom are still alive and still around. Some are spookily accurate, while some are merely representative without invoking any real sense of those they're playing. However, as with the screenplay, the direction, hell - even the whole Factory saga to a degree - it all works. Somehow. 24 Hour Party People is responsible for some of the most fun - memorable, meaningful fun - I have ever had while watching a film. An immediate, life-lasting favourite of mine.

    Tony Wilson: "And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They're applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester."
  • drago25
    February 15, 2008
    drago25
    24 Hour Party People is a really fun look at the booming Manchester music scene of the late 70s and 80s. Our guide and narrator is television presenter and record-company owner Tony Wilson (played by the awesome Steve Coogan), who in many ways greased the wheels for the music sce...( read more)ne in Manchester to take off the way it did (producing for example, the legendary Joy Division). The film pretty much has a style all its own, taking us through the scene largely in a sort of faux-documentary fashion. There are some great, funny moments and some awesome characters (all coming from real-life people), such as Andy Serkis as loutish record producer Martin Hannett, and the awesome Paddy Considine as Joy Division manager, Rob Gretton. The work of Coogan and most of the other actors is also great. It's a fun movie that doesn't take itself too seriously, and this more than makes up for its (relatively few) faults. If you've any interest in the British music scene at all, check it out.
  • Lin2321520
    November 6, 2009
    Lin2321520
    Pretty pointless and boring in my opinion.
  • paranoidandroid85
    October 28, 2009
    paranoidandroid85
    enjoy...







    enjoy ...
  • ahhh1989
    October 27, 2009
    ahhh1989
    My favorite Winterbottom film.
  • blacksheepboy
    October 23, 2009
    blacksheepboy
    As Tony Wilson (Coogan) states in this refreshing film, it is not a story about him, it is about the music - Manchester's music and those who have brought it alive.
  • truthofspirit
    September 26, 2009
    truthofspirit
    I like the scene with the pidgins ;-)

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Critic Reviews

August 22, 2002
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Great good fun even if you spent the 1980s listening to Loverboy. full review

August 16, 2002
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Shines with a kind of inspired madness. full review

August 15, 2002
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

The actors' performances are a mix of eerie mimicry and something more: a portrait of ambitious dreamers kicking around big notions and doing absolutely self-destructive, stupid things. full review

July 10, 2002
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Like the music, the film is outspoken, roaringly funny, defiantly sexual and relentlessly in your face. I couldn't have liked it more. full review

View more 24 Hour Party People reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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24 Hour Party People Trivia

  • What movie features a semi-biographical look at the band Joy Division, and the club at which they started?  Answer »
  • Which actor did NOT feature in the film "24 Hour Party People" by michael Winterbottom?  Answer »
  • Which of these Manchester bands was NOT featured in "24 Hour Party People"?  Answer »
  • Who stars in all these films? -Football Factory -Outlaw -Severence -24 Hour Party People  Answer »
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