Cynical Cinema

When I first told our music director that Alliance Films was going to send my a copy of Control to review for June 17th, I asked him if he would play a Joy Division song after this review, so that I could perhaps expand the minds of our classic rock listeners to a new kind of more obscure, but equally classic, rock music. His exact words were “there’s no way I’m putting that namby-pamby British sad-sack crap on CHEZ”. OK, maybe those weren’t his exact words, but he certainly said something along those lines. And this is the attitude many people have about this era of British music. The Smiths, The Buzzcocks, the Jam…they seem to make the bile rise in the throats of many hardcore rock afficionados, the way emo does today. But for the life of me, I can’t understand how anyone would love Nirvana and hate Joy Division. Or how they can talk at length about the merits of R.E.M. and down on The Jam.

But I think those people are in the minority, since Joy Division has become, since the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, recognized the world over as one of the most influential and one of the greatest bands of the late 70s and early 80s. And it is Ian Curtis who is the focal point of Control, the biopic by music video director Anton Corbijn. This is Corbijn’s first effort at a feature film, and it is terrific. It was Corbijn who, as a photographer, took the iconic photo of Joy Division that has become the definitive portrait of the band in the years since the death of Curtis. He has a real sense of history, shooting much of the movie in the real locations. Sam Riley stars as the singer, and he walks out of the house in which the real Curtis lived, down the street to the real building where Curtis worked. Corbijn has an incredibly astute visual sense, and the streets of Manchester are as important to the story as is the band itself.

Riley gives what truly is a star turn in the film. While it appears he was chosen for the role primarily because of his uncanny resemblance to the real Ian Curtis, he becomes so much more than that. Riley was not really an actor before landing the role in this film, be was a singer. And it really is him singing the songs on stage with Joy Division. The actors playing the rest of the band are really playing the songs. Riley has managed to mimic Curtis’ actual stage movements so precisely and so convincingly that on occasion I leaned in closer to the screen, certain that I was seeing file footage of Joy Division in 1979, and not Riley in a movie in 2007. Also wonderful are Samantha Morton and Alexandra Maria Lara as his wife and girlfriend respectively, the two women who (unintentionally, it would seem) tore his world apart. In fact, I think the very best thing about this film is the casting. This movie is perfectly cast all around.

Not only is Manchester a star of the movie, so too is the music of Joy Division, music which just gets better with every subsequent listen. As the movie goes on, the music itself tells a bit more of the story than we’re getting otherwise. And that’s because Ian Curtis was a man who lived through his music, who expressed himself in song and poetry and lyrics far better than he could in the real world, with words and conversation. (I have one bone to pick here though - “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, the definitive Joy Division song, appears too early. It’s a song about the conflict raging inside Curtis concerning the two women he loved, and the song appears in the movie before we really see that conflict appear. But it’s a small bone to pick.)

In many ways, Control is the best musical biopic of the last few years. Corbijn recognizes that it is impossible to tell the story of an entire life in just two hours without leaving some huge gaps. So he chooses to tell the story from the time Joy Division began through Ian Curtis being diagnosed with epilepsy, through his fits and his depression and his ups and downs, and finally through to his tragic suicide. There are still, of course, some giant gaps, but the streamlining of the biography helps Control avoid the bloated feel of movies like Ray and Walk The Line. And the fact that the music itself tells so much of the story is, I think, a luxury unique to this particular subject and this particular man. Very few singers in history have written such open, bare and honest songs about themselves, without being cryptic. Ian Curtis was not cryptic, he was not artsy for art’s sake, he was crying out for help through his music. Control is the story of the help that never came.