REVIEW: Control

The sad, short life of Ian Curtis has long since passed into rock legend. This new film by photographer Anton Corbijn (he took the famous photos on the cover of The Joshua Tree) meets the legend half-way, re-capitulating most of the legendary elements of the Joy Division singer while simultaneously presenting his story with a stark honesty (or at least, the impression of honesty). The film is therefore caught somewhat uncomfortably between cliches, a rock biopic that's trying not to be. In that tension it, deliberately or accidentally, catches the essential quandary of Curtis himself.

Curtis (played with uncanny accuracy, almost amounting to possession, by Sam Riley) is from a middle class Manchester family and in many ways lives up to their values and expectations. He attends a good, private school, gets a job at the unemployment office and wears a tie every day. It is only the isolation of his little bedroom where he, like so many of us, becomes a rock star. His desk is lined with folders with titles like "lyrics" or "poems". He chain smokes and absorbs albums by David Bowie and Lou Reed, posing in front of his mirror in a gesture familiar to every adolescent. He is thoroughly normal in many ways - his experiments with drugs, for example, amount to nothing more naughty than pilfering from medication from a friend's grandmother. He meets an attractive young girl from his hometown, Deborah (Samantha Morton), who he woos away from his best friend with poetry and brooding charm, and they get married while still teenagers.

His interest in becoming a musician is ultimately catalyzed by attending a Sex Pistols concert with some friends, some of whom have a band called "Warsaw". They are looking for a singer. After the show, Curtis offers his services, and Joy Division is born.

Up to this point in the film, we are on very familiar rock biopic ground. We get the scenes of their hesitant first gigs, the grind of traveling by bus, the first recording sessions, the acquisition of a fast-talking manager (Craig Parkinson, who almost steals the show) and ultimately their success. Curtis's problems begin when he discovers (somewhat late in life, the film is to be believed) that he is epileptic, not a particularly convenient disorder for a rock performer under stage lights. Treatment in the 1970s (again, if the film is to be believed) consisted of a horrendous cocktail of medications with side effects such as "mental confusion" and "fatigue", and the combination of this and Joy Division's nocturnal gigs ultimately costs Curtis his day job. The timing, for him, is rather inconvenient in that he and Deborah have no money and a newborn daughter. (It is refreshing to see a film portray the real costs of pursuing rock and roll dreams.)

As Curtis's fame grows, so does his overwhelming sense of depression and misery. When a sexy Belgian journalist named Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara) comes along, his life becomes more complicated again, with infidelity thrown into the mix. If the film is to be believed, Annik was actually a better match for Curtis than his long-suffering housewife, but he is too moral to make the choice a simple one. The combination of guilt, medication, malaise with music and serious depression lead him, as we all know, to suicide at the age of 23.

Corbijn handles all of this with a great deal of style, choosing to shoot the film in stark black and white. One gets the feeling of privileged intimacy (Corbijn knew Curtis and Joy Division in their prime, and produced some famous photographs of the band), and the key relationships (Curtis, his wife and his mistress) have the ring of complex, evolving truth, rather like in a French New Wave film. The film is not interested in Joy Division's music, although it features a great deal of it. We get no clues (other than telegraphed ones, such as the use of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" when Curtis admits his infidelity) about the music's creation or inspiration. The band themselves (who, as many probably know, would go on to become New Order) are caricatures rather than people, with only Bernard Sumner (who would take over as lead vocalist after Curtis's death) showing any sign of authentic human feeling in the moody, powerful sequence set in Curtis's last days. Samantha Morton is wonderful as Deborah, lending the film a much-needed grounding in the imperatives of real life.

Ultimately, Control's power comes from its attitude towards Curtis himself. Far from being slavishly sympathetic, the film has a welcome emotional distance from its subject, showing how different choices could have led him away from his tragic fate. Curtis comes across as someone who was loved, and was capable of love, but had too much emotional clutter on his plate to commit to marriage, fatherhood, employment, stardom and finally life itself. Whether he could have received the help he so obviously needed is an academic point - it may not have helped him, anyway. Curtis wasn't a victim of anything other than his own demons, and the film only hints, perhaps guessing, as we all must, where they came from and why he couldn't conquer them.