LOS ANGELES — To imagine “Control,” his film about the late English post-punk icon Ian Curtis, the first-time director Anton Corbijn had to outrun his own shadow. It was in 1979 that the then 24-year-old Dutch photographer moved to London on a whim, blown away by an album called “Unknown Pleasures.” He hoped he’d be more likely to stumble into Joy Division, the haunting and intense Manchester band that recorded the LP and boasted Curtis as its eerily charismatic singer.

Two weeks later, Mr. Corbijn photographed the foursome poised at the tunnel-like entrance of a London subway, coat collars high and backs turned. No one wanted to publish the image at the time. But the stark black-and-white shot eventually became emblematic of the group, whose brief, shining moment was cut short by Curtis’s suicide in 1980 on the eve of what would have been its first American tour. The survivors formed New Order, Curtis passed into rock ‘n’ roll legend, and Mr. Corbijn had launched a formidable career making gorgeous, richly detailed portraits of pop stars like U2 and Miles Davis.

“Everything is pretty amazing about the whole story,” Mr. Corbijn said. Eighteen years after that defining moment, the filmmaker was sitting over coffee on a patio at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. He was lean and losing his hair, in a tight-fitting T-shirt and blue denim jeans, and tennis shoes that marked him as someone vaguely rock star-esque amid the otherwise tony ambience.

“You go to a country, drawn by the music of some people, and then you make an image that becomes synonymous with the music,” he said of his early connection to Joy Division. “It’s beyond a dream, because you can never dream this.” Mr. Corbijn was in the studio with the band when it recorded its classic single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and he directed the video for its song “Atmosphere,” which became a template for the photographic work he did with U2 around the same time. “These were things that were seminal to the history of the band,” he said. “And now to make a film about Ian Curtis — for a lot of people, it is as close as they will ever get to seeing Joy Division.” “Control” follows Curtis from age 17 up until his hanging death seven years later, which came as the singer struggled with the use of heavy medications to subdue his epilepsy, as well as with an emotional tug-of-war between his wife and his Belgian lover, whose reflections were a strong influence on the screenplay. The shocking and premature loss of a tortured poet made Curtis his generation’s Jim Morrison, though his cult following has been more of the member’s-only kind, not a mass phenomenon like the postmortem pop life of Kurt Cobain.

Mr. Corbijn shot his film in a rich, luminous black-and-white, which is what anyone familiar with his work might expect. But he was keen to avoid repeating himself in other ways. “I think you start again,” he said. “You approach it for what it is. It was only two times that I met Ian, and they were very brief. These pictures you do so fast, and they live a life of their own.”

Rather than work in the overblown dynamic of the rock biopic, the director said he preferred to approach “Control” as a love story with some great music.

“The film doesn’t try to make Ian more of a myth,” he said. “It shows him as human, and also that a lot of beautiful things get made from mundane circumstances.” In chronicling Joy Division’s rise through the Manchester club scene, the film overlaps with Michael Winterbottom’s more bubbly take, “24 Hour Party People,”

in which Sam Riley — who incarnates Curtis in “Control” with boyish complexity — had a small role, as the Fall’s gnomic frontman Mark E. Smith. Its vibe is quite distinct, however, always looping back to Curtis’s relationship with his wife Deborah (Samantha Morton). It’s easy to liken the scenes to the kitchen-sink realism of early 1960s British fare, along the lines of “Billy Liar” or “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”

Mr. Corbijn insisted he didn’t know those. “What you’re looking at is a very English situation, but the way you’re looking at it is very European.”

No doubt, “Control” can be rapturously beautiful, even if cinematographer Martin Ruhe is framing a ratty couch against a dingy gray wall. Though, just as he’d rather not be seen as a “rock photographer,” Mr. Corbijn didn’t want to beat audiences over the head with stunning compositions. All the elements had to be integral. “We wanted it to look quite poetic, but to understate the beauty,” he said. “You have to get the same emotion out of the visuals as what inspires the visuals.”