From the mid 1970s to the late 1990s one name was, according to Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People at least, synonymous with the Manchester music scene – Anthony H. (Tony) Wilson. The film charts, to some degree, his career from hang gliding local TV news presenter to the Svengali behind Joy Division, Happy Mondays, Factory Records and The Haçienda nightclub.

From the aforementioned hang gliding event, which opens the film with Steve Coogan inhabiting the role of Wilson as a kind of real life Alan Partridge (though that’s to oversimplify) and almost instantly breaking the fourth wall, it’s clear this isn’t going to be a standard musical biopic and it’s not long before he openly admits that no one involved here is going to let the truth get in the way of a good story (albeit in typically Wilsonian philosophical tones).

From there we intercut from Wilson’s life as a regional TV host to his life promoting bands and clubs leading to some hilarious (and in one case strangely poignant) juxtapositions.

As he points out at one stage he, of course, is (arguably) only a bit part in his life story as the characters behind the music, both bands and Factory Records collaborators are equally part of things.

So we get well done recreations of Joy Division, New Order, The Durutti Column, Happy Mondays and more with Paddy Considine, Lennie James and Andy Serkis as the off stage talent, Serkis in particular being brilliantly bizarre as producer Martin Hannett.

Regardless though the film does centre on Wilson, and Coogan’s astonishing semi-improvised performance, as it’s centre point.

Biopics can be rather dry, or worthy, or twist things to show their subject in a positive light, but here that really isn’t the case.

Wilson certainly comes across as the arrogant, self-aggrandising and evidently awful businessman he really was while Winterbottom doesn’t try and make anything look any more glamorous than it could be, ‘highlighted’ by the Ryder brothers of Happy Mondays poisoning several thousand pigeons on a Manchester rooftop.

To do this he seems to shoot the more real life elements of the film to look like they were made at the time, so it has a grainy, scratchy feel for the 1970s and early 80s set sequences, and a cleaner finish to the later parts. Along with this is some great design with the graphics and some montages that firmly fit with the post-punk, psychedelic ideas that became ‘Madchester’ in the late 80s.

Added to this the whole thing has a documentary feel to such a degree that if it wasn’t for the narrative cinema devices and fabulous use of post modern (or maybe situationist, this is Factory after all) twists it would make a persuading documentary if shown to an unsuspecting audience.

This makes it feel like a distant cousin to a lot of the TV coming out of Britain around the same time from the TV news spoofing The Day Today and Brass Eye to alternative sitcoms like Spaced and The Office only added to by featuring a lot of the same actors.

The film also includes a smattering of ‘celebrity’ cameos, mostly the real versions of people portrayed by actors, that just add to this off centre documentarian style and reality shattering devices, all topped off with some almost psychedelically vivid aerial shots of Manchester reborn in the 1990s that are mesmerising and also add to the vibe or what The Haçienda and Happy Mondays created.

My own appropriately false memory of the film has me watching it on VHS from my local video rental place at university (Pier Video for anyone in Aberystwyth in the early 2000s), though, given the timing, I suspect it would have been on DVD at least.

Since then though it has always struck a chord with me and that remained watching it now as it manages to capture something of the feeling of a scene (or at least what I imagine it might have been, I wasn’t in Manchester until far more recently when much of this may as well be ancient history) and Wilson comes across as something of a visionary, if an admirably flawed one, who, given my involvement with new music and the media, I can only think of as something of a hero, if maybe not a particularly good role model.

Winterbottom’s film then is a glorious celebration of something very real but at the same time lost in its own mythology (and this does a great job in not saying which is which) and it portrays that balance perfectly while Coogan does the same with his teetering on Partridge interpretation of the iconic, irrepressible and times impossible Wilson and it sits alongside a few other films about the scene, such as 2007’s Control, very nicely.