Grade: B-

Verdict: A real party, but it's hard to keep track of the guests.

Details: Starring Steve Coogan. Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Rated R for language, drugs and sex. One hour, 57 minutes. Limited release

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Review: If you didn't know there was a major music scene in Manchester, England, from the late 1970s to the early '90s, "24 Hour Party People" is going to fill you in.

Done in a freewheeling docudrama style instead of as a straightforward documentary, the movie catches the beat, the energy, the drugs and the madness that fueled everything from punk to rave in a sodden industrial city that lacked both the big-city style of London and the working-class cachet of Liverpool.

At the epicenter was Tony Wilson (played by British TV star Steve Coogan). Wilson, a popular TV personality then and now, founded Factory Records, which launched such bands as Joy Division (later New Order) and Happy Mondays. The same bands played Wilson's club, Hacienda, which flourished from 1982 to 1992, when it went bankrupt. (The press notes call it the Studio 54 of Manchester, an odd concept.)

On television, Wilson was usually given human-interest assignments — a sheepherding duck or a dwarf washing an elephant — which he carried out with deadpan irony. But when it came to music, Wilson was a True Believer. The seminal event of his life came one June night in 1976, when the Sex Pistols made their first appearance in Manchester. There were only 42 people in the audience, but as Wilson points out with born-again fervor, "How many were at the Last Supper?"

For Wilson, the music wasn't just entertainment, it was a calling — a quasi-religious entity that needed a fervent acolyte like himself to tend to it. Early on, once Factory started signing groups, he decreed that 50 percent of the profits would go to the company and 50 percent to the artists.

Among the hits, misses and in-betweens were Joy Division (an underground sensation that became the commercially successful New Order), the Happy Mondays (a drugged-out miss after a nanosecond of fame) and A Certain Ratio (in-between). Hacienda gave them a live platform that made them stand out from their hugely famous predecessors. "The Beatles and the Stones were playing stadiums and 'Ed Sullivan,' " Wilson tells us in one of his many to-the-camera asides. "This is a more contained scene. You could go to the club and see the band and bump into other fans — literally."

Director Michael Winterbottom shows us the ecstatic rise and agonized fall of Wilson and his dream. The abundant sex broke up his marriage. The abundant drugs broke up his club: People spent money on drugs, not alcohol, so the drug dealers were the only ones who made money.

Wilson himself broke up almost everything else. On a trivial level, that means buying a conference table for $30,000 (and an ugly one at that). On a more serious one, he never required his artists to sign anything, so when London Records offered to buy him out, there was nothing for him to sell.

Robby Müller's sensory-overload cinematography and Trevor Waite's you-can-dance-to-it editing give the film a breathless beat. You feel as if you're there, on the dance floor, surrounded by the good-time chaos.

But Winterbottom, who has made such great pictures as "Welcome to Sarajevo" and "The Claim," has fallen into a trap or two. You'll learn a lot of things you probably didn't know (the unappetizing source of the name Joy Division, for example). But you won't learn a lot of things you may want to know.

Winterbottom skims the scene instead of exploring it. As a result, you can disengage from the picture at any time. When Ian Curtis (Sean Harris), the gifted lead singer of Joy Division, hangs himself in 1980, you're not so much sad or shocked as you are intrigued by the perfect pleat in his trousers as he dangles from the rope. It sounds heartless, but that's how removed you feel from the characters. You meet musicians, managers, partners, producers, whatever, but you don't get to know them.

The problem may be a corollary of another of the movie's weaknesses. Unless you lived in Manchester at the time or were reading every Brit rock magazine published in the 1980s, "24 Hour Party People" can be confusing. The film zips around so feverishly that it can be hard to tell who's who or which band is which.

Still, we do get to know Wilson, from his Cambridge University snobberies to his self-dooming naiveté. Coogan captures it all, especially in his direct asides, which are hilarious. He'll introduce us to someone, then casually add that, later on, "He'll try to kill me."

In the opening, we watch Wilson try hang-gliding — a human-interest gig that the real Wilson actually did. After an ecstatic ride and a rocky landing, he says he feels "battered, bruised, upset and elated." Not a bad description of his wild rock days in Manchester, either.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution