Subcultures: "24 Hour Party People" at 24

As if to further show up this year's generally dreary roster of pop-culture biopics, 2002's 24 Hour Party People returns to cinemas this weekend on the occasion of (yes) its 24th anniversary. On first release, Michael Winterbottom's film felt like the culmination of a larky, postmodern strain of cinema that had been gathering momentum over the course of the previous decade; it also struck the eye as a beneficiary of two simultaneous developments. This was post-Britpop Britain - in the form of this director and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce - learning to talk about earlier cultural achievements with a renewed confidence (Cottrell Boyce, of course, was headed towards collaboration with Danny Boyle on the London 2012 opening ceremony); it was also the British cinema reaping the benefits of the post-Partridge comedy scene. The film was at once tribute to and cautionary tale about a subject who was both pathfinder and prat, and whose prattishness - his fumbling and bumbling, his bescarfed pretensions, his many failures - somehow didn't obscure the fact he became a significant figure in British popular culture. Something about that subject - Anthony H. Wilson, gadabout local news reporter turned head honcho of Factory Records and founding father of Andy Burnham's New Manchester, overseeing that storied city's transition from hard industry to a leisure economy - seemed to invite experimentation: Cottrell Boyce and Winterbottom got their Wilson (Steve Coogan) not just to narrate but host the film about his life and work, as in reality linking between different sounds and scenes, redirecting our attention. The film thereby served as an extension of what Wilson had been trying to do all along. Winterbottom, too, was building a scene, and attempting to subvert anything conventional by allowing his featured artists (serious actors Paddy Considine, Sean Harris, Shirley Henderson, John Simm, Andy Serkis and Christopher Eccleston; comedy faces Peter Kay, Simon Pegg, Ralf Little, John Thomson and Rob Brydon; cameoing musicians Mark E. Smith, Howard Devoto and Mani) the freedom to try something new. Where necessary, both film and subject choose to print the entertaining legend rather than cleaving to the dull, well-rehearsed truth; and when all else fails, 24 Hour Party People lets some excellent, evocative, era-defining music play in Dolby Surround.

It remains self-aware in a way Wilson - who was still among us at the time of filming, called upon both to cameo and to serve as what the end credits euphemistically bill as "special consultant" - must have appreciated. Coogan's Wilson is all about image and legacy, ensuring the TV camera catches his flashy new boots, making sure the kids of Manchester saw the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and the Happy Mondays, enlisting Pegg's surrogate Paul Morley to write the book on this scene, scattering his speech with references so as to better articulate just what he was playing at, and finally landing upon an epitaph that suggests he was always working towards some masterplan. (Not Oasis, as it happened, although Wilson's overhaul of the Manchester music scene may well have had something to do with that group's success.) Winterbottom keeps it loose and lively rather than drably preordained, getting Robby Müller to shoot handheld digital that presumably needed some touching-up ahead of this reissue and asking his witty performers to improvise their way towards the crux of a scene or moment. Throughout, the direction holds to the idea that a brisk and vivid sketch is often more memorable than a comprehensive portrait, which is why the eerie four-minute evocation of Ian Curtis's final hours here has almost certainly been rewatched more times over the years than Anton Corbijn's worthy yet strenuous Curtis biopic Control. (The approach also yields a scene where Paddy Considine - as bristling Factory associate Rob Gretton - threatens to lamp Coogan for spending "thirty grand on a fucking table".) Yet between them, Winterbottom, Müller and Cottrell Boyce catch a lot in passing: Wilson's inability to sustain relationships, let alone a business (sorry, "experiment in human nature"); the baseline drabness of Britain from the late 1970s to the early 1990s; how lasting pop culture in this country has always tended to depend on committed individuals going the extra mile and dragging a ragbag crowd along in their wake. And so Wilson lives on: in the years since his death in 2007, he's given his name to Manchester's cultural sector and inspired both an especially discursive Morley biography and - hurrah - a new Cuban Boys single. Winterbottom, then at the start of his adventurous yet erratic film career, has yet to top 24 Hour Party People, and it seems a precipitous drop-off from this to Bohemian Rhapsody. But then - as Wilson himself would doubtless have noted - you can't really do much with Queen, can you?

24 Hour Party People returns to selected cinemas from Friday.