dirty monkey bugspray fun

Not so much a film about Tony Wilson - intellectual, television personality, club owner, and record company magnate - but rather a film revolving around Tony Wilson as it explores the Manchester scene from the late 70's through to the early nineties. Tony, played brilliantly by Steve Coogan, even acknowledges 2/3s of the way through the film that the story isn't as much about him as it is about the music, that he is a minor character in his own story, that the music is so much more than he is... which I'm not inclined to believe that he actually believes.
The brilliance of the film comes in all directions, from clever reproductions of famous Manchester scene bands to the contual breaking the fourth wall (ie addressing the audience directly), it's a dose of Hunter S. Thompson mixed with Nick Hornby (as it reminded me a little of both Fear and Loathing and Fever Pitch).
The center of the film, if not Tony Wilson, is then three bands - Joy Division, New Order, and the Happy Mondays - largely represented by three people - Ian Curtis (of Joy Division), Martin Hannett (producer), and Shaun Ryder (of Happy Mondays), personalities all trouble and larger than life, yet perhaps not quite capable of sustaining a film of their own.
The film is as much education as it is entertainment, and it succeeds at doing both. It manages to logically and, surprisingly, simply explain the transition of the Manch. scene from punk and post-modernism into rave, which generally would seem improbable at best, if not impossible... and yet, there it is.
Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson is great, portraying the wit, charm, ego, charisma, depth, and eccentricity that surely the real Tony Wilson also had. Yet early on, even Tony's character is overshadowed by that of Sean Harris' portrayal of Ian Curtis, dark, silent, and brooding, yet still captivating. Shaun Ryder, as portrayed by Danny Cunningham is much larger than life, and yet was too one-dimentional to really come to the fore of the second half.
Divided into two acts, and heavily referencing the metaphor of the wheel (ups and downs and full circle and all that), we see the pattern in Tony's life, the rises and the falls, and yet, how in the end, he did everything, and continues to do things his way.
A tremendous bit of monkey fun even if you aren't a music buff.