No Manifesto is a movie about the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers. This is the story of four young lads from a Welsh mining town and how they came to be one of the biggest bands in the world. Still struggling to come to grips with their Welsh identity, the Manics, like their music, are opinionated, introspective, inflammatory and as Castro so aptly put it, "Louder than war!"
This candid, partisan portrait of agitprop South Wales trio Manic Street Preachers by American film-maker Elizabeth Marcus captures them writing, rehearsing, recording and touring their eighth studio album Send Away the Tigers, released in 2007. Closely shadowing singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield, bassist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore, it captures their diffidence, self-awareness, mundanity and intimacy (especially when discussing talismanic, troubled guitarist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995, before being declared "presumed dead" in 2008). Financial pressure delayed completion of the film, rendering it several albums out of date on release, but it remains a valuable document for fans, nearly 100 of whom give awed onscreen testimony, ranging from the prosaic ("Nicky is Nicky") to the critical (the band's videos are "not very interesting"). Archive footage - which gives Edwards a spectral voice - and Julien Temple-influenced cutaways to pertinent movies (Rumble Fish, Stardust Memories, 1940 Ealing race drama The Proud Valley) add colour to this snapshot of a working, multimillion-selling band that is still treated like a cult.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| James Dean Bradfield | James Dean Bradfield |
| Nicky Wire | Nicky Wire |
| Sean Moore | Sean Moore |
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Elizabeth Marcus |
