STUDIO: The Weinstein Company
RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2008
STARRING: Samantha Morton, Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Joe Anderson,Toby Kebbell, Craig Parkinson, James Anthony Pearson, Harry Treadaway and Andrew Sheridan
WRITTEN BY: Matt Greenhalgh
DIRECTED BY: Anton Corbijn
FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Anton Corbijn
”The Making of Control”
”Out of Control: A Conversation with Anton Corbijn”
Extended Live Concert Performances
Music videos by Joy Division and The Killers
Theatrical trailers
Still gallery

The tale of the tortured genius who turns the musical landscape on its head, only to die far too young at his/her own hands (if not of suicide, then certainly of self-destruction) has become one of the oldest clichés in rock. So it’s a testament to the success of Control - an ambitious biopic on the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis - that it manages to compel in its telling of this all-too-familiar story.

Joy Division is often credited as the first “post-punk” band, meaning they incorporated the energy, rawness and confrontational nature of punk, but expanded its use beyond that of simple rebellion, to include explorations of more complicated emotions, moods and atmospheres. The band’s sparse, jagged guitars, sinewy bass lines and robotic drum patterns, combined with Ian’s bleak lyrics and macabre delivery, created a unsettling sound and aesthetic that would go on to influence everyone from The Cure and The Smiths to Interpol and The Killers (whose cover of Joy Division’s “Shadowplay” rolls behind the closing credits). When the band began to explode internationally in 1979, along with the help of Factory Records founder and tastemaker Tony Wilson, they sounded unlike anything that had come before. But as is often the case with art of such groundbreaking significance, behind the pop phenomenon, lies a truly tormented individual. Many devotees of Curtis’ legacy seem to have awarded him a martyr’s status... viewing him as someone who visited and eventually threw himself into the brink of loneliness and despair, in order to save the rest of us the trip. Whether or not Ian would’ve viewed that as a fair assessment of his music is unclear.

Although Ian died at just 24, his life experiences failed to resemble those of the people his age around him. When he joined Joy Division in 1977, he had already been married for nearly two years. Over the course of the three short years during which the band was together and rising meteorically, Ian’s young life took a number of other dramatic turns, including the birth of a baby daughter, Natalie, a secret love affair with a beautiful, Belgian woman, Annik, and perhaps the most complicating of all, a sudden diagnosis of epilepsy. Seemingly overwhelmed by his inability to meet his growing responsibilities to his band, wife and baby, Ian withdrew deeper into himself. And in order to manage his epileptic fits - often aggravated by the alcohol, lack of sleep and flashing lights associated with touring/performing - he was prescribed a heap of medications, whose side effects only seemed to worsen his already spiraling depression and anxiety. In 1980, he hung himself.

Far and away, the most effective aspect of Control is its music, as well it should be. Like most music biopics, the filmmakers’ initial plan for its performance scenes was to have the actors mime playing the songs to the original studio recordings. But Joy Division’s recorded albums (though only two exist) actually stand as important achievements in studio production; the instruments and voices sounds impossibly isolated and desolate. And though they encapsulate Ian’s outlook perfectly on record, those recordings simply wouldn’t have sounded authentic emanating from the amps in scenes meant to capture the immediacy of Joy Division’s nervy, tension-filled live performances. Thankfully, the filmmakers cast actors capable of doubling as musicians. So the songs heard in the film are actually being performed by the actors onscreen… a feat that required them to literally become a band in the process. And it shows. It makes for some of the most believable performance scenes I’ve ever seen in a film like this.

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