"24 Hour Party People"

"24 Hour Party People" is shot on digital video, and the stock is at once a miracle and an annoyance. Anything shot indoors looks pretty good. Anything shot under pink disco lights looks amazing. And anything shot outside, with real light, looks like pixellated garbage. But there are a lot of advantages to DV here. For starters, the camera really moves. You're always on the dance floor with Tony; you swirl around the druggy immersion of the Hacienda; the real archival stuff -- like Sex Pistols footage -- blends right in. (I gotta say, I'm in favor of all these movies made and released in theaters on DV: The stuff gets better -- and cheaper -- all the time. Plus, I see no reason why in five years I shouldn't have access to the resources to make movies just as bad as the ones George Lucas makes.)

Soon after the Pistols gig, Tony starts a club night on a local stage and starts Factory with his friend Alan Erasmus (Lennie James) and Joy Division manager Rob Gretton (Paddy Considine). Tony signs, in his own blood, a contract promising not to rip off his bands. The film handles mythological moments like this with the perfect amount of gravity -- which is to say none. People are drunk, smoking pot and laughing.

Yet Tony, as a character, is always reminding us of the import of certain events. The Sex Pistols show is compared to the Last Supper, for example. He is conscious of making history at every moment. But the film undercuts that by letting Tony be, at once, an enthusiastic narrator and a complete idiot. (He declares tone-deaf Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder, played by Danny Cunningham, to be the best poet since Yeats. Sample line: "And all the bad preserves be things that feed me/ I never help or give to the needy/ Come on and see me.")

Factory's first band is Joy Division, and the movie narrows in on the quartet. The actors playing the band members, here and in the rest of the movie, are expertly cast -- particularly Sean Harris as Ian Curtis, all angular intensity and strained neck muscles. Joy Division here represents the beginning of something, and the exuberance of creation, the fun, flailing mess of rock. They're great on stage, they hang around smoking pot, they're willing to try harebrained studio tricks.

Then, out of nowhere if you believe the movie (which we know we shouldn't), Curtis hangs himself. Staying true to their method, director Winterbottom and writer Boyce refuse to treat his death seriously, playing it for black comedy at least three different ways. The weird thing is that it's easy to forgive: You can tell just how much everyone -- and the movie -- misses him.

The Happy Mondays, a shambling lad band, are the center of the second act of the film. (One of their songs is the source of the film's title.) And while the first part was about joy and promise, the second half is about chaos, drugs and incredibly stupid business moves.

I once saw the Happy Mondays live and used to listen to their records all the time, but for the life of me I can't remember why. At best they're a third-tier band in the annals of rock history, notable only for druggy excess, three singles and including in the band a guy whose only job was to gobble Ecstasy and groove to sloppy fake soul-funk.

I'm guessing the Mondays might signify something different in Manchester, and, like so many things that don't make sense to Yanks, it probably has to do with class. Or maybe just drugs. The Mondays revitalize the ailing Hacienda nightclub -- bought in the early '80s and co-owned by Factory and New Order. Before long, acid house, Ecstasy and rock bands that make dance music have turned the club into the No. 1 party scene in the country. Tony tells us something preposterous -- that this was the birthplace of rave culture, more or less -- but by now we're seasoned not to believe him.

Like everyone around him, Tony crashes into his own excess, and the movie grinds down to an ending that is much more rewardingly finite than the end of a music scene ever is. The Hacienda is overrun by drug dealers who bleed it for money, New Order is recording in Ibiza and the Happy Mondays are on crack in Barbados. Tony is about to lose everything, but not in an after-school special kind of way. Because that is the grace of "24 Hour Party People." Instead of a message, we find out something else: that rock 'n' roll, like youth, is fueled by idealism. And that there are different ways to be an idealist.

In the case of Tony Wilson, you can be a wasteful, philandering drug addict who talks too much. And in the end, you'll still manage to treat people right, have a good time and do something meaningful for people. To sell out, but to not sell what's important. To do something big enough for history, and be big enough to let it all go.

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