'24 HOUR PARTY' REPLAYS MUSIC OF MANCHESTER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE'' is a two-hour cinematic party.

Between all the staggering and drooling, it tries to tell us something about the Manchester music scene that spawned such post-punk marvels as Joy Division and, later, the world-conquering rave movement.

All the movie really manages to tell us about, though, is the bemused but irrepressibly amusing worldview of Tony Wilson. A Cambridge-educated presenter for a second-rate British television station, Wilson moonlighted as the impresario behind the musical explosion that put England's second city on the cultural map.

As expertly played by comedian Steve Coogan, Wilson comes off as light-years smarter and more practical than the indulgent, self-destructive artists he coddles and adores. He's still very much a privileged twit with absolutely no sense of moral or fiduciary responsibility.

A wry narrator, Coogan/Wilson repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to comment directly to filmgoers about incidents and people as they pogo through the narrative. This not only provides a fine showcase for some of screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's choicest lines, it helps us keep some track of what's going on. But director Michael Winterbottom, it appears, was more interested in re-creating the feel of new wave club nights and the Ecstasy-fueled, financially ruinous scene at Wilson's fabled Hacienda venue than he was in exploring the musicians' immolating creativity.

This is especially frustrating in the case of Joy Division's suicidal frontman Ian Curtis. Though played with Tourette charisma by Sean Harris, Curtis' seething demons are only examined in the most cursory fashion, his epilepsy presented as a mere stage affectation and his reasons for hanging himself not elucidated in the least. As for Wilson's other big act, the Happy Mondays are drawn as slobbering junkie stereotypes more thinly imagined than Curtis' tortured artist is.

Although you don't really get to know most of the players, ``24 Hour'' does make you feel like you could have been up all night partying and puking with them. There's an immediacy to even the slightest characterizations that melds us into the screen experience. That sensation is only enhanced by the relentless, high-energy soundtrack and jitterishly alive, sepia-toned, digital video camera work by the great Dutch cinematographer Robby Muller.

Unless you go in knowing a lot about the music, the Manchester attitude and Wilson's idealistic but ridiculous business plan for his Factory record label, you're not going to learn a whole lot from this bleary docufarce. At one point, Wilson tells the audience that it's all really about the music, at another that the most important thing is Mancunian pride.

``I'm a minor character in my own story,'' he says, disingenuously but accurately. Yet ``24 Hour Party People'' is all about Tony Wilson, all the time, and because of that, it never rises out of minor key.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE - Three stars

(Rated R: language, drug use, violence, nudity, sex)

Starring: Steve Coogan, Danny Cunningham, Sean Harris, Shirley Henderson, Andy Serkis.

Director: Michael Winterbottom.

Running time: 1 hr. 50 min.

Playing: Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Monica, Santa Monica; University, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Amusing but shallow re-creation of the Manchester post-punk music scene.

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Steve Coogan stars as new-wave impresario Tony Wilson in ``24 Hour Party People.''