Most memorable in the film are the intimate details, which usually get lost in most big-picture biographies scenes of Curtis' watching the bizarre ending to Werner Herzog's Stroszek shortly before killing himself are especially haunting. The two married while teenagers, and as Joy Division gets popular Curtis' is torn between life as a husband and father and as a musician who has an affair with a Belgian journalist.īouts of epilepsy – even, occasionally, on stage – and a variety of medications prescribed to combat them also complicated matters. Corbijn has achieved a similar feat with Curtis' story here.Īt the core of the film is the relationship between Curtis (played by Sam Riley) and his wife, Deborah (Samantha Morton). When Joy Division recorded their first album in 1979, members of the band were said to be unhappy with the clean, atmospheric album that producer Martin Hannett had delivered, which contrasted with their grittier live style only later did they come to accept it as the band's definitive sound. What could have been a rough, tragic descent into punk madness a la Sid and Nancy is instead a mosaic of bleak, sterile imagery filmed in a gorgeous black-and-white that recalls the British ‘kitchen sink' films of the 1960s. Curtis was anything but the typical punk rocker – timid, clean-cut, good-natured – and Corbijn's film is anything but a typical troubled-artist biography. A stark, haunting biopic, Anton Corbijn's Control profiles Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who killed himself at age 23 in 1980, just as the post-punk band was rising to fame.