As dramatic punches go, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you tried very hard to make it otherwise, an Ian Curtis biopic would still be devastating. The Joy Division singer was, after all, only 23 when an unholy alliance of medical, psychological and romantic troubles led him to commit suicide. And Sam Riley’s unnervingly good performance never lets you forget that Curtis was little more than a boy at the time.
Mr. Riley and photographer-turned-director Anton Corbjin have done splendid work here. Their Curtis is a sensitive naïf who haunts rather than inhabits the world around him. Obsessed with David Bowie and writing, this lonely creature and born romantic marries his childhood sweetheart (Morton) but is ill-equipped to deal with the realities of grown-up relationships. While Joy Division blossom into a darksome post-punk force, Curtis becomes increasingly veiled in depression.
Psychologically speaking, there is very little here that couldn’t be gleaned from Twenty-Four Hour Party People or the briefest biographical blurb. That is probably as it should be. Control gives us the incidentals but does not presume to know Curtis or the precise cause of death.
Corbjin is keen to include the kitchen-sink details – Ian walking around with a plastic bag, Ian painting the house, Ian working in the job centre – but his aesthetic says ‘print the legend’. This Manchester owes more to the Teutonic gloom of Joy Division’s music and Peter Saville’s artwork than to reality. Frequently, the aptly named Control resembles a series of still photographs, a barely animated La Jetee, that’s just too pretty, too academic and too composed to really win you over.
Still, the director and his fine cast do manage to draw you in to a minimalist drama that has, in terms of narrative, no new ground to break. And we’d happily watch this lovely, cheerless thing a thousand times over than sit through five minutes of most musical-biopics. Oliver Stone’s The Doors, anyone?