Control: Anton Corbijn Paints an Elegiac Portrait of Manchester Musician Ian Curtis

This is a revived and revised version of a 2007 Amazon film review that dropped off the site over the years. This tends to happen when a home video release keeps appearing in new forms, like a standard release in 2008 or a Blu-ray/DVD edition in 2019. 

CONTROL

(Anton Corbijn, UK, 2007, 122 minutes)

In his elegiac directorial debut, photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn combines the music film with the social drama to stunning success.

Adapted by Matt Greenalgh (Sam Taylor-Johnson's early-Lennon portrait Nowhere Boy) from Deborah Curtis's clear-eyed 1995 memoir, Touching from a Distance, Control recounts the tale of a working-class lad about to hit the highest highs only to be waylaid by the lowest lows.

Born and raised in Macclesfield, a suburban community outside Manchester, Ian Curtis (newcomer Sam Riley in a remarkable performance) dreams of fronting a rock band. Just out of high school in the mid-1970s, and besotted by the proto-punk coming out of New York and the art rock coming out of London, he finds three like-minded musicians, Peter Hook (Joe Anderson), Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson), and Stephen Morris (Harry Treadaway), with whom he forms post-punk quartet Warsaw, aka Joy Division. Riley and cast mates ably recreate their somber sound.

All the while, in between shifts at various employment agencies, he falls in love, marries, and fathers a daughter with Deborah (Samantha Morton, turning a thankless role into a triumph). While Curtis should be enjoying parenthood and newfound fame, he's plagued by seizures. A diagnosis of epilepsy leads to powerful medications with unpredictable side effects.

Then, while on tour, Ian falls in love with another woman, Belgian journalist Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara). His solution to these problems is a matter of public record, but Corbijn concentrates on Curtis's brief, eventful life rather than his tragic death, unlike Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, which also focused on the Manchester music scene of the 1970s and '80s.

Just as Control establishes a link between such disparate black-and-white pictures as fellow photographer Bruce Weber's 1988 Chet Baker elegy Let's Get Lost and kitchen-sink classics like Tony Richardson's 1962 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner with Tom Courtenay, the Dutch-born, UK-based director presents his subject not as some iconic t-shirt image, but as a deeply flawed--if massively talented--human being.

An impressive debut from a filmmaker who knew the band, the geographic and cultural milieu, and most of all: the man at the center of the maelstrom.

Control is available on home video and on numerous streaming platforms, including free services, like Tubi and Plex (with ads). Images from Hanway Films (Sam Riley), The New York Times via The Weinstein Company (Riley with Joe Anderson), and The Guardian (Riley with Samantha Morton).