Con­trol is a rare musi­cal biopic to appeal to me, even though I am only barely famil­iar with the music of Joy Divi­sion, and even less so of the his­tory of trag­i­cally doomed lead singer Ian Cur­tis. To tes­tify to the film’s power, I imme­di­ately pur­chased The Best of Joy Divi­sion right after watch­ing the movie. Lis­ten­ing more deeply to them for the first time, I’m struck by how much influ­ence they obvi­ously had on even the biggest bands of today, most obvi­ously Inter­pol but also no less than U2 (espe­cially in their first three albums, and in Adam Clayton’s bass playing).

Trans­mis­sion

Con­trol begins with Cur­tis (Sam Riley) as a young lad in 1970s Man­ches­ter, absorb­ing all the rock star lessons that are there to be heard in David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. He applies androg­y­nous glam-rock makeup mod­eled after Bowie and Brian Eno, pops pills (ironic, con­sid­er­ing the wide cock­tail of drugs he’s later pre­scribed when his epilepsy man­i­fests), writes anguished poetry, and sees the Sex Pis­tols live in their prime: “they were crap.” But his own band Joy Divi­sion cre­ates a gen­uine new sound, a world apart from glam or punk. They seize the atten­tion of Man­ches­ter music scene maven Tony Wil­son (Craig Parkin­son) with a hand-scrawled note read­ing “JOY DIVISION YOU CUNT,” hand-delivered imme­di­ately before a scorch­ingly intense live set. Wil­son, him­self immor­tal­ized by Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s bril­liant biopic 24 Hour Party Peo­ple, becomes their great­est advo­cate, lit­er­ally sign­ing their con­tract to Fac­tory Records in his own blood.

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Cur­tis’ fame came before the com­forts of money. He found him­self on the cov­ers of mag­a­zines, offered a tour of Amer­ica, and desired by exotic women while still reliant on a depress­ing desk job and tor­tured by his own ambiva­lence towards his young fam­ily. Saman­tha Mor­ton plays his wife Deb­o­rah as a shy, overly trust­ing girl. The real Deb­o­rah was later to write her auto­bi­og­ra­phy and co-produce this film with Tony Wilson.

Direc­tor Anton Cor­bijn is most famous for his music videos and por­traits, includ­ing the iconic The Joshua Tree sleeve for U2. Even though this is his first fea­ture film, he is inti­mately expe­ri­enced with the art of cap­tur­ing rock (and rock stars) on film.

Offi­cial movie site: www.control-movie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.