Back in 1965, a young, enigmatic Bob Dylan was filmed touring Britain in what many regard as the greatest rock tour movie of all time. Now, more than 50 years after Dont Look Back (sic) caught the early stages of a famous career – and the dying embers of the singer’s personal relationship with Joan Baez – one of Britain’s most renowned film-makers is offering his own take on a major UK tour.

Michael Winterbottom, director of The Trip, 24 Hour Party People and Welcome to Sarajevo, has been inspired to create an up-to-date chronicle of life lived from gig to gig. His new film, On The Road, looks close-up at the life led by members of London four-piece band Wolf Alice, their crew and entourage. Already a big name in British rock, the young band is now braced for public reaction to the film’s premiere at the London Film Festival on 9 October.

“I watched Dont Look Back again before I started making this,” said Winterbottom. “I like the way it doesn’t appear to be trying to tell you anything, but you pick up a real picture of the people and of the world they are in. What I have made is kind of simple – just saying this is what happens on the road.”

The new film follows the four Brit award-winning musicians, who played on the main stage at Glastonbury this year, on their recent British tour – tracking them on and off stage and focusing on the work of the crew and support team who keep the show moving.

“They are a very hardworking band and I hope that comes across. The team around them have to be hardworking too, with all the routine and repetition. It is a kind of music I like and Wolf Alice are great live,” Winterbottom said.

The 55-year-old director was speaking from Spain, where he is finishing a new series of The Trip, the acclaimed TV comedy in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon pretend to be reviewing restaurants for this newspaper.

Winterbottom was drawn to filming Wolf Alice, he said, partly because of a series of small coincidences, such as the fact that the band took its name from an Angela Carter short story; Winterbottom’s first job was working as a researcher for the writer. “One of the other attractions was certainly that they are a young band. It must be amazing for them writing songs and then seeing thousands of peopling loving them that night,” he said. “And for us it was much better to show the realities of life on the road with a documentary approach rather than a fictionalised one.

“There is stage performance, of course, but there is normal backstage stuff, like lying in bed or having a shower backstage, meeting friends in the crew or falling in love . We wanted to find a way to show all of it. It is a romantic life, but it can be horrific, too, doing the same thing all the time.”

The band – Ellie Rowsell, Joff Oddie, Joel Amey and Theo Ellis – played the final night of the tour on Saturday night at Margate. Guitarist and frontwoman Rowsell says she does not know what to expect from the added exposure of the film.

“I have no idea what it will do,” the 24-year-old said. “We agreed because we are open to new experiences and we have never worked with actors and producers before. I hope we don’t come across as annoying, or bad and stupid. But I suppose anyone in the public eye should have these anxieties really.”

Just like some of Winterbottom’s previous hits, including his 2005 film A Cock And Bull Story, On the Road is not all it appears to be. There is a deliberately shifting grip on documentary fact, but it provides an accurate picture of the pressures on young band members and how they cope with the cliches of life in and out of a tour bus.

The film, which is a documentary but uses some creative licence, is far from being a lurid chronicle of bohemian misbehaviour. No longer are TVs thrown out of hotel windows, cars driven into swimming pools or drugs taken to such excess, according to Stephen Taverner, the band’s manager.

“Michael just jumped on our tour really, wanting to capture that sense of young people having a great time, but I would say things have definitely calmed down from the 80s. He has since said he got the idea for a film about a tour after meeting [1990s band] Ash in New York and hearing a lot of their stories of excess. He had not mentioned that to me. I managed that band!”

During his career Taverner said he has watched younger musicians being “a little bit more sensible and realising they can have a career if they play it right”. “They don’t feel behaving like that is a rite of passage any more,” he added.

Rowsell said she found the camera no trouble most of the time. “Michael kept out of the way as it was a fly-on-the-wall style,” she said. “We went about our normal day, so it was quite easy. Because there is a narrative, there were maybe a couple of slightly staged or repeated moments, and when you are not used to the filming process and are told to ‘be normal’, you forget what your response might usually be.”

The joy of being on tour is genuine, she said. “I really like it. I see new places – and I love performing in front of a crowd. But we provide the surroundings for the film: although they spent a hefty amount of time with us, we are not the biggest characters.”

The band started as a folk duo, with Rowsell and Oddie finding the other band members four years ago. They released their official debut single, Fluffy, in February 2013, and another, Bros, followed three months later. A debut album, My Love Is Cool, came out last year and their single, Moaning Lisa Smile, was nominated for a Grammy Award for best rock performance this year.

“When Michael came to us with the idea of the film, I, and some of the others, were a bit paranoid about the potential Spinal Tap element to it all,” said Taverner, referring to the spoof rockumentary. “But he was very understanding about that concern and gave us some control.”

The band were fans of 24 Hour Party People, Winterbottom’s 2002 film about Tony Wilson and Manchester’s Factory Records music boom in 1976, and the director’s controversial and explicit hit 9 Songs was also admired.

Rowsell, who first tried writing stories and poetry before picking up a guitar at 14, is preparing to start working on a new album. “We will be writing again in our houses, on our own, sometimes together. We are now looking for another space we can use,” she said.

For Winterbottom, Rowsell was the perfect frontwoman. “Ellie is a great role model for the girls in the audience, you can see that. She is very charismatic and it is nice to see that in the kind of band that might have had mainly male fans.”

• This article was amended on 2 October to correct the spelling of Stephen Taverner’s name