In 24 Hour Party People the Manchester, England music slash club scene circa 1980 is put under the microscope by director Michael Winterbottom (The Claim). Unfortunately he forgot to take the lens cap off! Winterbottom’s film is one of worst docu-dramas to have wobbled down the M1 in a long time. It purports to tell the story of one Cambridge-educated Tony Wilson, a hack Granada TV reporter who established Factory Records (label of Joy Division, The Happy Mondays, and New Order to name a few) and, later, the Hacienda, an insanely popular, Ecstasy-laden money pit of a dance club after witnessing the Sex Pistols perform live–a seminal moment to be sure. “But this film isn’t about me,” Wilson reminds us. Unfortunately it is, and there’s hardly a frame of celluloid that doesn’t feature British comedian Steve Coogan up close and personal as the obnoxious pratt Wilson (who, we learn, is still alive and kicking today, still working for Granada TV and still, no doubt, making dumb and pretentious asides every chance he gets–sorry Tony!). Wilson’s over-extended character isn’t the main reason to avoid the film, however, it’s Winterbottom’s incomprehensible approach to the material. I mean, what’s the point of introducing cool live footage of, say, The Buzzcocks or The Jam with wobbly, psychedelic-colored captions that YOU CAN’T EVEN READ! 24 Hour Party People should have been fascinating, electric, helping us to understand, perhaps, why Ian Curtis (played here with skeletal freakishness by Sean Harris) might have killed himself. Instead, it’s a joyless division of fractured historical perspective, name performers in cute cameos (that’s the real Howard Devoto in the bog at The Factory watching Wilson’s wife having it off with his namesake, for example), and heavy-handed attempts to aggrandize anything that moves, like a sheep-herding duck, flying saucers, or a red squiggly conference table that cost thirty grand. File under D for dreck.