By now, less pop-obsessive viewers probably have had their fill of films about the rise and fall of the music scene in Manchester, England, in the late 1970s and early 1980s — the post-punk era. First there was Michael Winterbottom’s comedic “24 Hour Party People,” which anatomized the birth of rave culture. Then, last year, Anton Corbijn delivered his poetic “Control,” a subdued biopic about Ian Curtis, front man for iconic dance-mopers Joy Division. There has also been “Factory,” an excellent BBC documentary on Manchester-based Factory Records and its renegade founder, the late television-personality-turned-entrepreneur Tony Wilson.

Finally arriving on American DVD via the Weinstein Company, there is now “Joy Division.” Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary is a solid case of the best having been saved for last. The project covers all the same territory, but keeps its focus pinned to the saga of the band and the presumably enigmatic Curtis, whose suicide in 1980, at age 23, came as the group was set to embark on its inaugural American tour. The act spelled the demise of Joy Division, but sealed Curtis’s legacy as a Jim Morrison-like cult figure. Like the Lizard King, Curtis’s manic, gloomy intensity marked him as part tortured poet, part rock ‘n’ roll animal, replacing Morrison’s brazen sexuality with a empathetic melancholy to which teenagers and Northern Englanders, especially, could relate.

The surviving members of Joy Division carried on as the smoother, keyboard-driven dance band New Order, and Manchester erupted as a mecca for psychotropic revelry, design, and fashion, via Wilson’s nightclub, the Hacienda, and his record label, Factory. Much like Joy Division’s premature demise, Wilson’s enterprises were doomed, but live on as fabulously visionary and quixotic leaps into creative insanity.

Mr. Gee, who specializes in rock documentaries (Radiohead’s “Meeting People Is Easy”), manages to convey a lot of history, yet he does so with such thoughtfulness and passion that his footage feels like the freshest commentary on the lives and times it documents.

The original members of Joy Division — Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, and Stephen Morris — speak with a sometimes corrosive, but generally good-humored candor, their faces isolated against a silky black backdrop, part of a hyper-stylized visual approach that sharply offsets the extensive archival footage, which is typically grainy, low-tech video. The skillful editing of 30-year-old clips captures the remarkable transition of the band from an assortment of gawky losers barely competent on their instruments to a tightly meshed ensemble capable of playing ferociously biting rock on the level of their heroes, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Unfortunately for Curtis, what nourished him as an artist destroyed him as a mortal soul.

The scenes of the performer, many of them previously unseen, combined with the recollections of his bandmates, his Belgian lover Annik Honore, and, of course, the verbose Wilson, provide the clearest portrait of the singer. If the brilliantly art-directed “Control” offered up a version of Curtis that was too deliberately underbaked, Mr. Gee makes more sense of the performer’s life and death, as well as the pain caused by his failing marriage, the pressure of the band’s growing popularity, and the worsening epilepsy that made Curtis’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle a constant, looming catastrophe.

One of the documentary’s strengths is its script, which was written by punk historian Jon Savage (“England’s Dreaming”). Unabashedly romantic in its claims, for both the music and the ways that it transformed the rotting industrial city of Manchester, the narration captures the spirit of the times with poetic incision and no small glimmer of pop utopianism. Thanks to such elements, “Joy Division” is not a slick postmortem. It feels more like a call to arms.