He begins to suffer from epileptic seizures and to worry that the medicine he takes to treat the condition will affect his moods and his mind. While still a teenager, he marries Deborah and becomes a father just as Joy Division is recording its first album. His performance is quiet, charismatic and a little opaque, in keeping with the movie’s careful, detached approach to its subject.īut the group’s progress - it wins the favor of the Manchester music guru Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) and acquires an aggressive manager in the person of Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) - is accompanied by increasing complication and strain in Mr. Riley does not labor under the burden of mimicry, like the recent portrayers of more famous singers like Ray Charles or Johnny Cash. Curtis is known more by his deep, plangent voice than by his face or his physical presence, Mr. Riley, hollow-eyed and gentle-looking, is crucial to the film’s effectiveness. Shot in a pale, Nouvelle Vague black-and-white palette, “Control” manages to be both stylized and straightforward, avoiding overstatement even as it generates considerable intensity. Corbijn resists the temptation to pile on the evocative period details or to wallow in nostalgia for the early days of the Manchester scene.
In tracing them back to their origins, Mr. Joy Division’s two albums were artifacts of their time that became permanent fixtures in the pop universe, available to any listener with a good reason to want a few minutes of voluptuous bad feeling. (Just how good they are may not become fully apparent until you hear the real Joy Division’s version of “Atmosphere” over the end credits.) Riley and the other members of the cast (Joe Anderson on bass, James Anthony Pearson on guitar and Harry Treadaway as the wisecracking drummer) who turned themselves into an uncannily persuasive tribute band. You hear a lot of these on the soundtrack, flawlessly performed by Mr.
Where it might have been literal-minded and sentimental, it is instead enigmatic and moving, much in the manner of Joy Division’s best songs. One of the great virtues of “Control” is that it does not fall into this trap.
The worst and most common failing in movies of this kind - biographies of artists, musicians in particular - is that they turn creativity into a symptom and fate into pathology. Curtis’s artistic life and its premature end without treating them as simple cause and effect. How, in other words, to take account of Mr.
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Curtis died, is how to tell this story of great promise and early death without turning it into yet another exercise in pop martyrology. Corbijn, a celebrity photographer who took pictures of the real Joy Division a few months before Mr. The challenge facing Matt Greenhalgh, the screenwriter, and Mr. Even as Joy Division’s austere, brooding songs - “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Isolation,” “She’s Lost Control” - have continued to influence musicians from all corners of the musical cosmos, they have lost very little of their glum, haunting power. He was 23, and in the years since his death he has become a canonical figure in his own right. Curtis, the lead singer in Joy Division, the great post-punk Manchester quartet, committed suicide in 1980, just before the band was to embark on its first American tour. Of course, from its very first frame, “Control” is shadowed by intimations of its main character’s imminent mortality. Ballard), yes, but also William Wordsworth, whose “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” Mr. Curtis’s life, Anton Corbijn notes some of the figures in the young man’s personal canon - the expected proto-punk culture heroes (David Bowie, Lou Reed, J. In his debut film, “Control,” about the last seven years of Mr. Apart from cigarettes and his best friend’s girlfriend (whom he will shortly marry), these are mainly musical and literary. In 1973, when we first encounter him, Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) is a lanky schoolboy in Macclesfield, a red-brick English town outside of Manchester, with intense but not unusual interests.
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