Tolling the Division Bell

There probably won’t be a better-looking film this year than “Control.” Though it wasn’t inevitable that Ian Curtis, the haunting and haunted singer for the British post-punk band Joy Division, would become fodder for a biopic, it was pretty obvious that only one man should direct it: Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer whose stark, black-and-white images probably did as much to immortalize the short-lived group as Curtis’s 1980 suicide.Mr. Corbijn and his cinematographer, Martin Ruhe, returned to that black-and-white format for “Control,” creating what looks a lot like a latter-day variation on a 1960s “angry young man”-type drama. But the grit in the kitchen sink is polished. The film depicts the rudiments of Curtis’s workaday life in northeastern Macclesfield, England, with a kind of creamy luminosity that turns even the scrubbiest setting into something beautiful. Perhaps there’s a metaphor in that for the singer’s own struggle to resolve troubling personal issues by transforming anguish and guilt into urgent rock epiphanies and sublime, darkly textured laments that sounded like existential hymns. Joy Division’s great songs, such as “She’s Lost Control,” “Transmission,” and its break-up anthem for all eternity, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” were brilliantly produced by Martin Hannett and packaged by Factory Records, the Manchester label owned by enigmatic media personality Tony Wilson, who died in August.Curtis was among the tangents in Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 comic recasting of the Manchester scene of the late 1970s and ’80s, “24 Hour Party People,” and there is a certain degree of overlap — Sam Riley, who plays Curtis in “Control” with a hair-trigger sensitivity, had a bit part as Mark E. Smith, of punk pioneers the Fall, in Mr. Winterbottom’s film, and Wilson recurs as a floppy-haired figure at once pompous and self-deprecating. In one instance of classic rock lore, Wilson (Craig Parkinson) inks his contract with the band in his own blood, puncturing one of his few unbandaged fingers to add some belated script. The funny stuff aims to balance the downward arc of the story, which follows Curtis as he evolves from a teenaged Bowie disciple into an intense and charismatic performer whose grasp on his emotional health begins to slip steadily as the band becomes more successful.The musical sequences are properly thrilling, showing Joy Division as punk-inspired nerds riding atop a rare and galvanizing wave of artistic enthusiasm and mayhem, and Mr. Riley’s Curtis as a tightly wound character whose frantic body movements at the microphone conveyed a combusting ecstasy. The actors play their own instruments for much of this, which lends these scenes a scruffy authenticity. But since Matt Greenhalgh’s screenplay draws a lot of its detail from a memoir written by the singer’s widow, Debbie Curtis, much of the narrative focus is on her turbulent marriage to Ian, and the tension sparked by her husband’s affair with a Belgian rock journalist.The love triangle isn’t the only thing stressing out Curtis. He’s been diagnosed with epilepsy, an ironic turn of events because of his offstage duties at an employment service for the disabled. (Though Mr. Corbijn insists he didn’t bone up on his Tom Courtenay films, the scenes in which Curtis contends with his various clients feel much in the spirit of “Billy Liar.” In one of them, a woman collapses into a frothing, gnashing seizure, eerily presaging Curtis’s own ailment). The heavy medication Curtis takes to control his seizures throws him off his game, and seems to propel him into the deep depression that leads to his suicide the night before the band is set to fly to New York to make its American debut.It’s a pity that so much of “Control” rides on domestic discord. Even with a brave and risk-taking actress like Samantha Morton as the long-suffering Mrs. Curtis, the movie bogs down. Though the director hoped to demystify Curtis, who more than most rock legends was sealed up inside the tomb of his songs — he died before he really got to be famous — the effort flatlines the drama. There’s just nothing all that remarkable about a rock star who cheats on his wife and feels bad about it. Yet, Curtis made amazing music out of that situation. “Control” never quite connects the dots in a way that is as exciting as those songs are to hear, even as it evokes sympathy for someone whose fractured art is, finally, all we will ever really be able to know of him.

Tolling the Division Bell

More from the New York Sun

Back to the USSR, Russian Wait in Gas Lines — and Fume

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrats’ New Voting Math

Trump-Backed Candidate for Georgia Governor Loses His Primary to Billionaire First-Time Candidate

More from the New York Sun

Back to the USSR, Russian Wait in Gas Lines — and Fume

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrats’ New Voting Math

Trump-Backed Candidate for Georgia Governor Loses His Primary to Billionaire First-Time Candidate

Democrats Withhold Judgment on Clayton’s Nomination To Be Spy Chief, Choosing To Wait for Answers at Confirmation Hearing

Warsh’s First Press Conference as Fed Chairman Could Offer Clues About His Promised Reforms

Justice Department Seeks To Join Lawsuit Challenging Evanston’s Reparations Program

Hegseth Presses GOP Lawmakers for $350 Billion Pentagon Spending Increase Atop $1.1 Trillion Defense Appropriations

After Court Loss, East Village Group Says Fight Over Mamdani’s Homeless Intake Center Plan Is Far From Over