The line from first-time feature helmer Anton Corbijn is that, in making his biopic about Ian Curtis, singer for miserablist icons Joy Division, his main priority was to not make a “music film.” Considering that Curtis’ short life was entirely defined by escaping into and later making music before his suicide at age 23, it’s unsurprising that the result is a folly—and an uneventful, unthoughtful one at that.
Control’s screenplay, by Matt Greenhalgh, is based on Curtis’ wife Debbie’s memoir, Touching From a Distance, four words that describe Corbijn’s default setting for dealing with his subject. Redacted in the name of Byronic hagiography are Curtis’ black sense of humor, formative family relationships (a portentously gloomy mother and father are seen but not heard from), drug use, nasty mood swings and persistent rumors that he, upon occasion, enjoyed a good day.
Instead, Control relies entirely on its gorgeous black-and-white, high-gloom imagery to suggest, vaporously, a panoply of things about the singer that Corbijn either won’t commit to or isn’t aware of. In short, it’s exactly what we feared from a Joy Division movie by Corbijn, a photographer overpraised for his glossily gothy work with Depeche Mode, U2 and, yes, Joy Division.
We first see Curtis (earnestly played by newcomer Sam Riley) in long shot, long coat and shadows amid post-industrial Manchester suburban squalor. There’s no ambient sound, just the muffled shuffle of Curtis’ feet. Nice—very Joy Division.
Then it’s Curtis at school, a pretty, meek, sweet kid prone to spacing out. (An intimation of the devastating epilepsy to come? Can’t say.) He gets a job helping the old and mentally disabled, something a smarter filmmaker could milk for informative irony or poetics. Instead, Corbijn coats Curtis in evocative soundtrack swaths of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Roxy Music.
Curtis meets laconic prick bassist Peter Hook (Joe Anderson), feckless guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson) and dim drummer Stephen Morris (Harry Treadaway) and forms Joy Division just in time for post-punk, an entire musical movement whose import Control ignores, save for some hipster-pleasing references to The Fall. Curtis falls for and impregnates plain-Jane Debbie (Samantha Morton), whom he insists dress in a dowdy manner—an interesting, unpleasantly imperious quirk never elaborated upon.
The band is signed by (the late) Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) to his Factory Records. Yet the significance of Wilson and Factory—arguably the U.K.’s most influential subcultural label ever—is ignored.
Anyway, Curtis falls for cute Belgian journalist Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara). His epilepsy worsens, he feels bad about cheating, and, just before a U.S. tour, he hangs himself.
Nobody’s asking for a post-punk Behind the Music. And considering a sequence where we see a female character lose control leads to a shot of Curtis writing the lyrics of—oh dear—“She’s Lost Control,” perhaps it was wise that Corbijn mostly avoided addressing Curtis’ creative process. But to disregard the schism between the good-hearted if moody naif painted here and the downright terrifying baritone of absolute psychic desolation heard on the records—to which Riley lip-syncs—suggests that it never occurred to Corbijn that there was a dichotomy worth exploring. Then again, this vast omission may be the result of—and there’s no nice way to put this—his amateurish direction.
Relying on a succession of uninflected, essentially static shots, Corbijn appears either ignorant of or disinterested in using cinema grammar for dramatic effect. The singer suffering an epileptic seizure is filmed in a dull, distancing medium shot; a concert performance isn’t exciting so much because the music is great—it is, of course—but because it occurred to Corbijn to use a high-contrast film stock, a welcome visual relief from the gray-scales used everywhere else. And while Riley gives good brood and has Curtis’ trademark spasmodic stage moves down, he falls short at evoking what made simply looking at the real Curtis unsettling—that shock-numbed, lost-boy expression, the huge, fathomless eyes animated with a desperate, mad neediness. Corbijn’s direction of Riley constantly scuttles any hope of depth.
And so, Control’s only takeaway is that Curtis killed himself because he couldn’t sort out his love life. That would at least be a way of looking at him, but Corbijn won’t embrace that. You get the sense the core reason for the waffling is that Corbijn is too respectful of his subject to let anything interpret him in terms of larger themes. That same distancing respect makes you wonder what the point was of making a movie about the guy, not the music, in the first place.
Control
*1/2
Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Joe Anderson
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Rated R
Opens Friday