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CONTROL
Directed by: Anton Corbijn.
Produced by: Corbijn, Orian Williams & Todd Eckert.
Written by: Matt Greenhalgh, based on the book Touching from a Distance by Deborah Curtis.
Director of Photography: Martin Ruhe.
Edited by: Andrew Hulme.
Released by: The Weinstein Company.
Country of Origin: Great Britain. 121 minutes. Rated R.
With: Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Alexandra Maria Lara, Joe Anderson, James Anthony Pearson, Harry Treadaway, Craig Parkinson, Ben Naylor & Toby Kebbell.

Like a character from a contemporaneous 1970’s Springsteen song, Ian Curtis married at 19, released his first record with Joy Division at 21, was a father at 22, and dead at 23. But rather than the usual music biopic of doomed excess, Control’s Curtis is the tormented rock icon next door, exhaustively wracked by guilt over an adulterous love affair and afflicted with epilepsy.

Debut Dutch director Anton Corbijn, known for his 30-year career in rock ‘n’ roll photography and music videos, filmed Control in black and white, reflecting the image Joy Division chose to project in their promotional materials. By using the grays of the band’s home in bleak post-industrial Manchester, the cinematography links Curtis’s story to the rebellious cinema of British kitchen sink dramas at the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, though this angry young man is more middle class and intellectual.

Fascinated first by the glam rock of Iggy Pop and David Bowie, Curtis surrounds himself with the books of Allen Ginsberg and J. G. Ballard, quotes Wordsworth, and watches Werner Herzog films. His bookshelves are also filled with notebooks of his own poems, lyrics, and novels, which form the basis for the narration. At the Sex Pistols’ first concert in Manchester in July 1976, he realizes how he can put it all together to express himself through rock ‘n’ roll and finds in the sparse audience his future band mates.

Several Joy Division tracks are heard on the soundtrack to demonstrate the influence of the late producer Martin Hannett (Ben Naylor) on their smoother recorded sound. But Corbijn emphasizes the band’s sweaty, driving, live performances through 10 songs effectively recreated by the four actors eerily portraying the band members, with Sam Riley, sounding a lot like Jim Morrison, as the jerkily dancing front man, and Harry Treadaway (minus his twin and co-star, Luke, from Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s dark music business satire Brothers of the Head) as drummer Steve Morris.

As a troubled enigma beset by pressures of family, touring, and medication, Curtis here recalls the fictionalized portrait of Kurt Cobain in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Matt Greenhalgh's script is based on the memoir by Curtis's widow Deborah (played as the girl next door by Samantha Morton) and supplemental interviews with his more sophisticated Belgian lover Annik (the irresistibly beautiful Alexandra Maria Lara). Curtis is seen contradictorily through their eyes leading a double life. On the road with Annik and the band, he’s a rising rock star on the cover of music magazines. At home, Debbie shrugs off his fame, washing his underpants while he’s recording “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

The portents are ominous. When he suffers his first grand mal seizure after a performance, his doctor warns against late nights and lack of rest, but his entourage nags him about taking his meds, despite his doubts about their efficacy and debilitating side effects. (An epileptic collapse at one concert leads to a riot.) And the despairing song selections emphasize certain autobiographical resonances, like the repeating chorus of “Digital” – “I feel it closing in/Day in, day out,” while the film’s title plays out on his weeping song “She’s Lost Control.”

Beyond the urban landscapes gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Martin Ruhe, Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People provides the missing context of the burgeoning Manchester music scene and Factory Records, the music label for Curtis and, later, for his band mates reconstituted as New Order. Winterbottom also movingly includes a clip of Corbijn’s influential posthumous video tribute to Curtis.

The mordant commentary on the Party People DVD by label owner Tony Wilson (portrayed in Control by Craig Parkinson) supports Corbijn and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s interpretation of Curtis’s life, including casually noting that the road manager was responsible for caring for the singer on tour, and how friends sheltered Curtis as his marriage broke up. Wilson, who died in August, defensively explains Joy Division’s provocative Nazi references, including its name (appropriated from the term for the brothels for German soldiers). The band eventually backed off from such jargon as the fascist party, the National Front, gave the band unwanted attention. Nora Lee Mandel
October 10, 2007