Plot
The story opens in the late 1970s in the Pennines, where Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), reporting for Granada Television embarks on a hang gliding adventure, despite not having any training. After crashing several times and receiving a "rather unfortunate" injury to his coccyx, he walks away, then turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, saying the scene was symbolic of what is to come on many levels.
Wilson is dissatisfied with his job as a television news reporter, finding stories like the hang-gliding stunt unfulfilling, telling his producer, Charles (John Thomson), "I'm a serious fucking journalist ... I went to Cambridge." Wilson then attends a concert in June 1976 at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall by the Sex Pistols (the Buzzcocks were also to perform but were not ready). Despite only being attended by 42 people, Wilson cites the concert as a great historical event that would inspire attendees to "go out and perform wondrous deeds".
For his part, Wilson, the host of a music show, So It Goes, decides to move beyond just putting bands on television and get into promoting concerts. With some friends, actor Alan Erasmus (Lennie James) and Rob Gretton (Paddy Considine), Wilson starts a weekly series of punk rock shows at a Manchester club. It is during the opening night, and a performance by a band Gretton manages called Joy Division, that Wilson is caught by his wife, Lindsay (Shirley Henderson), getting fellatio from a woman in the back of the club owner Don Tonay (Peter Kay)'s "nosh van". She then retaliates by having sexual intercourse in a toilet cubicle with the Buzzcocks' Howard Devoto (Martin Hancock), and is caught by Tony (he was told of this by Alan a few seconds earlier). The real Devoto, portraying a janitor cleaning the bathroom sink, then turns to the camera a few seconds after Wilson passes him by and says "I definitely don't remember this happening."
Wilson continues in the music business, and with his friends, starts Factory Records, signing Joy Division (Sean Harris, John Simm, Ralf Little and Tim Horrocks), led by erratic, brooding lead singer Ian Curtis (Harris), as the first band. Showing his dedication, Wilson prepares a record contract for the band, written in his own blood, giving the artists full control over their music. Irascible producer Martin Hannett (Andy Serkis) is hired to record Joy Division, and though he is difficult to work with – he orders Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris, to dismantle his drum kit and reassemble it on the roof of the studio – the results are the work of genius, and soon Joy Division have a hit record.
The success is short-lived, however, when, just before Joy Division is to tour the United States, Curtis commits suicide by hanging himself. The news is broken to Wilson as he is preparing to do a news report about a Chester town crier, and the distraught Wilson asks the crier to report on Curtis' death. Joy Division beat the odds and survive the death of their lead singer, going on to rename themselves New Order, and record the hit song "Blue Monday".
Factory Records continues with the building of its nightclub, The Haçienda, with an opening night performance by Factory band A Certain Ratio in front of less than 40 customers. The Haçienda shown in the film was not the real club, but a replica built in a Manchester factory space; the original club was closed in 1997 and demolished in 2002, replaced by luxury apartments. The exterior of the building is used in some scenes. Another hit band, the Happy Mondays, are signed, and the beginning of the ecstasy-fuelled rave culture is witnessed.
Despite all the success, Factory Records is losing vast amounts of money, both on The Haçienda and on recording its bands. In one scene, Erasmus points out (with a grin on his face, ironically) that the label is actually losing 5 pence for every copy of the 12-inch single for "Blue Monday" that is sold because the intricately designed packaging by Peter Saville costs more than what the records are being sold for. Saville is additionally portrayed for having a reputation for missing deadlines, turning in posters and tickets for club dates after the events have already occurred. The Factory partners try to save the label by selling it to London Records, but when it is revealed that Factory does not hold valid contracts with any of its artists, the deal falls through.
Other troubles include the drug use by the Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder (Danny Cunningham), who holds the master tapes for the band's troubled fourth studio album hostage until Wilson gives him some money. When the master tape is played, it turns out that Ryder, despite being hailed by Wilson as "the greatest poet since Yeats", was unable to write any lyrics (or, as implied in a cutaway segment called "The Life and Surprisingly Strange Adventures of Ryderson Crusoe, refused to write them; "Why the fuck should I?!", he explains), so all the tracks to the album, expensively recorded in Barbados, are instrumentals.
Hannett has also become unpredictable, attempting at one time to shoot Wilson with a pistol. He has a falling out with Factory Records over finances, and spirals into decline due to alcohol and drug abuse and weight gain, and dies aged 42. Meanwhile, various aspects of Wilson's life are glossed over, and Wilson takes a moment to acknowledge this, quickly skimming over his divorce from his first wife, Lindsay, his second marriage and children, and his relationship with beauty queen Yvette Livesey (Kate Magowan). His own drug problems and professional difficulties are also glossed over. "I'm a minor character in my own story," Wilson explains, saying that the stories about the music, as well as Manchester itself, are more important.
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“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)