From Requiem to Rave...

But ultimately the journey, rather than the destination, is the point. And this is where the film is so effective. Shot on digital video by Robby Müller, best known for his work with Wim Wenders and Lars von Trier, the swirling hand-held camera work is sometimes sick-making, but more often mesmerizing. You get a real sense of what it was like to hang out at these clubs, to have someone bobbing up and down to the music in front of you while, say, a neofascist sketched a drunken Nazi salute somewhere in the periphery of your vision. It's as though we were watching someone's blurry, impressionistic memory of the scenes, rather than the scenes themselves.

The acting is uniformly excellent. As the doomed, enigmatic Curtis, Sean Harris is chillingly good, and Andy Serkis almost matches him as genius producer Martin Hannett, who becomes so bloated from drugs and alcohol that the gravediggers have to dig an extra-large space for his plus-size coffin. In the end, though, it's Wilson's film. As portrayed by the British comedian Steve Coogan, well-known to British television audiences (and a few local devotees of BBC America) for his work on I'm Alan Partridge, he's one of those wry, oddly distant people who galvanizes others and generates passion all around him while seeming to feel little deeply himself. His comment as he stands next to Curtis' open coffin -- "That is the musical equivalent of Che Guevara" -- sounds like a press release. And yet no one could say he wasn't idealistic or that he didn't help make something extraordinary, and without ever trying to profit from it himself. By keeping his day job as a presenter for Granada Television -- doing everything from interviewing dwarfs, to test-driving hang gliders, to hosting The Wheel of Fortune(with a typical sense of style, he kicks the show off with a quotation, picked up earlier from a drunk in the street, from Boethius) -- he manages to separate his financial from his creative self and run a record company without a trace of self-interest.

The famous contract he signed with his bands, written in his own blood and granting them total artistic freedom (he never owned the rights to their music), was at once an act of genius and of jaw-dropping folly. Still, you can't help wondering how much any of it really meant to him. Wilson is both in the thick of things and eternally above the fray, and, ultimately, his unflappable cool creates a distancing effect in the viewer as well. But even at a distance, the movie's a rave and a half.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE | Directed by MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM | Written by FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE | Released by United Artists | At Laemmle Sunset 5, Laemmle Santa Monica and Laemmle Playhouse 7