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Michael Winterbottom’s intriguing, daring, freewheeling movie is being rereleased for its 24th anniversary. It is about Manchester legend, Factory Records impresario, club owner and Granada TV journalist Tony Wilson, played by Steve Coogan, who was a driving entrepreneurial force behind the city’s music scene and guide to bands such as Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays.
Looking back to my original review I see that I was in some ways unconvinced, perhaps by the almost flippant, throwaway tone that is somehow evenly established from first to last, with Coogan’s Partridgean lead performance – very good though it undoubtedly is – delivering all the lines as if doing a wry piece to camera. He was arguably the only possible casting for a minor TV personality who was also a major player in the real world beyond the camera, a postmodern combination that Wilson, a sophisticated and intelligent man, himself surely savoured. Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story, adapted from Laurence Sterne, is sometimes described as his postmodern work, although this film, with its fourth-wall breaking, real-world cameos and docu-realist sense of itself, is probably even more metatextual.
The loose, baggy energy is what makes this film so watchable, and yet it sometimes feels formless, with something detached in Winterbottom’s direction; on first seeing it, I think it felt almost as if a rough assembly edit had been accidentally released instead of the final cut. Coogan is the chirpy, droll Wilson, presenting regional TV news items in the 70s as well as Granada’s culture programme So It Goes. Through the latter, he saw how the punk explosion was being ignored by the rest of the media and so made it his business to be punk’s evangelist, having been at Sex Pistols’ Free Trade Hall concert in Manchester in 1976, among the tiny audience that Wilson here semi-seriously compares to Christ’s apostles.
From there, he develops a remarkable and even unique identity as the post-punk patron. He insists on freedom of expression for all the bands he mentors and promotes, with no real contract other than a bizarre document signed in his blood – to the later astonishment of London music executive Roger Ames, played by Keith Allen, who realises that Wilson does not have legal rights to the back catalogue that Factory Records has amassed.
Peter Kay plays the lairy club owner that Wilson first does business with; Lennie James is Factory co-founder Alan Erasmus; Andy Serkis is producer Martin Hannett; Shirley Henderson is Wilson’s first wife, Lindsay, who has a fictionalised fling with Magazine lead singer Howard Devoto, which the real Devoto comes on to dispute. Sean Harris gives a stark and spiky performance as the legendary Ian Curtis, the Joy Division lead singer who was to take his own life (a very different performance from Sam Riley’s more empathetic portrayal in Anton Corbijn’s film Control).
The scene at Curtis’s funeral is in many ways the mysterious centrepiece of the film; we see Wilson actually standing by Curtis’s open coffin, hustling a music journalist (Simon Pegg) to write something, doing deals, exploiting the situation, and yet certainly gaining no real financial benefit. Is Wilson supposed to be a parasite, a vampire, even a monster here? He certainly seems emotionally unmoved – which is even more striking as the film implies that Curtis’s loneliness and depression might have been accelerated by the fact that Wilson wasn’t at home when Curtis came round to see him before his death.
The music itself is not used in the jukebox slam way that another director might have chosen, to direct mood and atmosphere and help create the light and shade of narrative. It always seems to stay diegetically in the background as the story just rolls onward, all its crazy episodes and incidents apparently not having any real emotional effect on Wilson, even as his empire collapses financially. Yet it’s an absorbing and unique piece of work – a movie of style and surface.
English (US) ·