‘EVERY f***er out there knows I’m talentless. But I’m a situationist. I. Make. Things. Happen.” There’s the one line that sums up Creation Stories, a biopic of Scottish rock mogul extraordinaire Alan McGee, premiering tonight on Sky Cinema.

The line manages to combine both hard-bitten, east end of Glasgow self-knowledge, and an awareness of avant-garde revolutionary practice (referencing the French situationists of the 60s). And the line’s payoff is McGee taking responsibility for one of the biggest bands of all time (Oasis), some of the coolest (Primal Scream, Jesus and Mary Chain, Teenage Fanclub, My Bloody Valentine), and telling enough coke-encrusted stories to… well, make for a rollicking movie. But for those of a certain generation (and location), there’s some deeper and broader questions thrumming away, behind the stadiums rocked and the frequented crack-dens of McGee’s life story.

In order to create the “alchemy” he so often invokes, did you have to be a Bowie-head and a punk rocker? Did you need those grim industrial and bureaucratic norms to kick against? And are we all too absorbed in the informational Matrix at the moment to be able to swing a Doc Marten at anything?

In McGee’s telling (only occasionally fabulated by the movie’s co-scriptwriter, Irvine Welsh), he comes from an oppressive working-class background – one that’ll be familiar to readers of modern Scottish literature. McGee’s first day as an apprentice in his dad’s business involves a near-fatal experience at the top of a rickety ladder. The same father rails at his son for using his mother’s cosmetics to glam up for a gig – while wearing his own sky-blue Master Mason’s apron.

Even this early, McGee is “making things happen” within tight constraints. He secures a ticket job on the Glasgow-to-London train, so he can pursue his world-conquering pop ambitions in the metropolis, for at least half of each week.

But the claim to be a “situationist” in the opening line is probably the biggest clue as to exactly how McGee triggered his successes. His version of the “ultimate TV event of all time” isn’t a moon-landing or 9/11, but watching the Sex Pistols (and their entourage) sprawl across their chairs in the famous Bill Grundy talk-show interview, cursing and abusing the hapless anchorman.

It’s a matter of rock legend that the scene was orchestrated (or at least encouraged) by the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren. As a follower of disruptive situationists like Guy Debord and Alexander Trocchi, he knew how such “events” could shake up the frame of accepted reality.

Yet McLaren’s catchphrase was “cash from chaos”. Meaning seize the public narrative with shock content, thus amassing free publicity, thus selling music, thus inflating your next record company advance.

The movie makes clear that McGee might well have perpetrated such reality-crimes. Asked if he encouraged audience riots at early Jesus and Mary Chain gigs, McGee smirks ostentatiously. There’s also a hilarious interview scene where the Chain express dour contempt for punk gods like Joy Division and the Pistols. Cue record-scratch sample, and even more media front covers.

There’s no sense that McGee planned the biblical chaos and conflict that marked the Gallagher brothers’ relationship in Oasis. Speaking from personal experience, I know that such sibling tensions in young men tend to come out in pop interviews anyway – you hardly need to foment it.

BUT you’d have to agree with one commentator on this movie, who points out that McGee tends to discover bands that seethe with internal tension and the permanent capacity for mutual injury.

McGee’s written biography is full of physical beatings inflicted on him by his father, which is heavily downplayed in the movie. And it’s true – or at least it was – that rock’n’roll is a home for broken, sensitive, aspiring prole boys, a place they can temporarily bolt themselves together. Falling apart, very publicly, is also very much an option.

Yet Creation Stories also shows how pop and rock music can instil a “talent” for the business of show, and for the big narratives it contains. One that isn’t just relevant to malcontents with guitars.

Towards the end, McGee finally meets his own mentor, Malcolm McLaren, who gives him a fully-worked out theory of boredom as the ultimate driver of culture: “Ennui’s a killer, Alan … Everything I’ve done was always a reaction against boredom. Since man learned to harness fire, build shelter, clothe and feed himself, boredom has reared its ugly head.”

“You’ve done hedonism,” McLaren drawlingly continues. “You need to find something that stops you falling into that claustrophobic comfort. We are alchemists of magical stuff. We take boredom and we weave it into a spectacle – a gift not often bestowed. We are masters of other peoples’ destiny …”

In the movie, McGee’s pursuit of “alchemy” is seen to lead him to try and politically harness Oasis and other acts. He’s shown wheedling at them to lend their Britpop glamour to Tony Blair and New Labour, which they somewhat do. But the following scenes seem like the end of something for McGee. There are harsh portrayals of Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell in their prawn-cocktail pomp. A private dinner at Chequers with the Blairs shows sulphurous Jimmy Saville holds court there, which leaves McGee wiping his jacket sleeves in disgust.

The movie confirms McGee’s own post-rehab obsessions with “chaos magic” and actual “alchemy”, or at least the version of it advocated by Aleister Crowley. Given McGee’s willingness to out-compete his own artists for the ingestion of mind-altering substances, it’s maybe no surprise he’s willingly stepped into occultism. But it’s also a skewed answer to a maybe unanswerable question: why does a cultural operator have the Midas touch at one point, then lose it?

By all reports, McGee is signing bands again, and seems to be in a relatively balanced state. The movie ends with a permanent call to rebellion. But the call feels pretty nostalgic. Take this world of network surveillance, exhausted left movements, spectacle-wielding populists, evermore confident authoritarians, neutered citizens either framed by big media or addicted to social media, and a planet on fire. What bit do you rebel against first? Or maybe you rebel against all of it, at the same time.

He. Made. Things. Happen. But maybe different kinds of things need to happen, in these deeply unstable days – when rocking and rolling is more a systemic imperative, than anything to do with your mum’s cosmetics. We need a new set of creation stories.

  • Creation Stories debuts on Sky Cinema, tonight, 10.10pm