Control (***)

Some lives are easier to understand than others, and the life of a introvert who committed suicide at 23, in May 1980, doesn’t present the most obvious dramatic arc. Ian Curtis was the singer in Joy Division, a UK band whose music may be best known to Americans, especially those under 40, via the version of “Shadowplay” by the Killers that plays over the closing credits here. The song, whose lyrics talk about “acting out your own death,” was a moderate hit on the rock charts and made #68 on the Hot 100.

Curtis (Sam Riley) obviously saved a lot of his words for his songs. He wasn’t flamboyant, and his stage mannerisms can be called dorky. His childhood was apparently ordinary enough to be left out of the film. Despite his affection for the punk rock scene that inspired Joy Division, he didn’t try very hard to act out the rock-star lifestyle. In one of the earliest scenes, a high school teacher catches him daydreaming, but he merely apologizes. Later, he walks around with the word “Hate” written on his jacket, but he’s still mild-mannered enough to were a tie during his day job helping the unemployed, and traditional enough to propose to his teen sweetheart, Debbie (Samantha Morton).

In the end it’s the intensity of the character and the crisp black-and-white cinematography used by Anton Corbijn that hold your attention. Riley, who’d barely acted before this, turns out to both look and sound a lot like Curtis, judging by the video clip on the DVD, and he and the other actors do an entirely credible job re-creating the band’s performances. Corbijn doesn’t dig into Joy Division’s actual music-making process and only barely portrays the Manchester scene that the band grew out of. (For more on that, see 24 Hour Party People, about the indie-music impresario Tony Wilson, who would give Joy Division its record contract. Craig Parkinson plays Wilson here.) But there are several performance scenes, and my guess is that if you don’t care for the band’s droning brand of post-punk, you’ll like this significantly less. (This is in contrast to Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s subsequent collaboration, Nowhere Boy, which has more of a story and can easily be enjoyed whether or not you care for John Lennon’s music.)

The film suggests Curtis’s epilepsy diagnosis, or the medication he took for it, as fuel for his apparent depression. But in the end his descent is of course not entirely rational, and we see it much through the eyes of Morton’s Debbie (whose book was the basis for the film), who is the most sympathetic character. On Curtis’s tombstone, Debbie had the title of Joy Division’s sole (post-suicide) UK smash, “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The lyrics suggest his state of mind:

You cry out in your sleep,
All my failings exposed.
And there’s a taste in my mouth,
As desperation takes hold.

IMDB link

viewed 1/31/11 and 2/1/11 on DVD [Netflix] abnd reviewed 2/4/11