Joy to the World

Control pays quiet tribute to Ian Curtis.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

LEADER OF MEN: Sam Riley is the spitting image of Joy Division's singer. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Bleakly beautiful and elegantly sparse, Anton Corbijn's Control is as rigorously sober and yet filled with emotion as the best of Joy Division's songs. The one thing people who don't know the band's music know about Joy Division is that lead singer Ian Curtis (hauntingly incarnated here by Sam Riley) took his own life at the age of 23, on the eve of their first U.S. tour. The movie leads ineluctably to the moment when Curtis, despondent over the breakup of his marriage and unbalanced by his epilepsy meds, hangs himself in his kitchen. But Corbijn, who knew the band in their heyday and took some of the most famous photographs of them, approaches Curtis' death without trivializing his life, and pays tribute to his life without minimizing the tragedy of his death.

In its broad strokes, Control is a standard-issue rock bio. Ian, a shy teenager whose hooded eyes hold untapped depths, sits in his bedroom devouring David Bowie's Aladdin Sane. He attends the Sex Pistols' legendary gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall, and joins with three like-minded souls to form a band like no one has ever seen. They play shows and become famous, but Ian becomes increasingly troubled and isolated, and the strain becomes too much. The curtain falls on Joy Division's story, admitting Curtis into the pantheon of rock visionaries who died too young.

But if Curtis' rise and fall adheres closely to a pre-established script, Control doesn't look or feel like any rock pic in recent memory. Best-known for his unfailingly sober portraits (the cover of U2's Joshua Tree is one memorable example), Corbijn infuses the movie with a sense of quiet stillness that makes the moments when the actors playing Joy Division charge into a song that much more thrilling. Watching their first big break, performing "Transmission" live on Tony Wilson's TV show, you can actually feel the pieces fall into place, as if they've become a great band right in front of your eyes. Joy Division's songs aren't complicated, and some of the recorded versions aren't particularly well played, so the fact that they're performed here by James Anthony Pearson, Joe Anderson and Harry Treadaway rather than Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris makes surprisingly little difference. Riley perfectly captures Curtis' uncanny stage movements, a strange hybrid of dancing and marching in place.

Control is on rockier ground when it comes to Curtis' personal life. Although the movie is nominally based on Curtis' widow, Deborah's Touching From a Distance, she comes off in Samantha Morton's portrayal as a shapeless doormat in pleated jeans. Ian and Deborah were teenagers when they married and quickly had a child, but Morton is a good decade past her teens, and so what should come off as a young woman's naïveté seems more like the professional obliviousness of a born victim. When a stylish Belgian named Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara) waltzes into Ian's life, you can't blame him for wanting to go with her.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Once Curtis discovers he has epilepsy, a condition exacerbated by late-night gigs and touring, a pall begins to settle over the movie. Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh find moments of comic release in the disparity between the band's rapidly escalating profile and the unglamorous reality of their daily lives, many pointed up by their manager, Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell). But when Gretton announces that the band's U.S. tour is just two weeks away, it's disheartening to check your watch and realize the movie still has an hour left. Unless you're making Last Days, that's more time than anyone wants to spend with an imminently doomed rock star.

Control mercifully declines to provide an ironclad reason for Curtis' death, but Corbijn too frequently succumbs to the temptation to use Joy Division songs as explanatory subtitles. As the band records "Isolation," the camera shows Curtis in a soundproof booth, massive headphones over his ears. Ian tells Deborah he no longer loves her; cue "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Control is best when Corbijn reaches the farthest, as when a close-up of Curtis' upturned, crying face evokes director Carl Theodor Dreyer's Joan of Arc, or when it focuses on the quotidian details of Curtis' life. It's in the middle where Corbijn tries to bring the two together, that it runs into trouble.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Control

Directed by Anton Corbijn, A Weinstein Company release