24 Hour Party People re-released for 24th anniversary, revisiting Manchester's music scene

Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film "24 Hour Party People" is being re-released to mark its 24th anniversary, bringing renewed attention to its freewheeling portrait of Manchester's post-punk music scene.

The film centres on Tony Wilson, the Granada TV journalist and Factory Records impresario who became a driving entrepreneurial force behind Manchester's music culture, including his role as a guide to bands such as Joy Division, New Order and Happy Mondays. Steve Coogan stars as Wilson in a performance widely regarded as one that only he could have delivered.

The film is noted for its daring, metatextual style, breaking the fourth wall and blending real-world cameos with a docu-realist sensibility, approaches that set it apart from more conventional music biopics of its era.

Winterbottom, whose other work includes the postmodern adaptation "A Cock and Bull Story", brings a similarly self-aware sensibility to this film, treating Wilson's own blend of television personality and real-world cultural influence as material the journalist himself would likely have appreciated.

The re-release offers audiences a chance to revisit a film that captured a pivotal period in British music history, as well as to reconsider its unconventional, genre-blurring approach to telling Wilson's story more than two decades after its original release.