Control

[MacGuffin]

At Cannes, a Biopic of Joy Division Star

A small film about a short-lived rock star is making a big splash at Cannes.

"Control" the story of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who committed suicide at 23 marks the feature-film directing debut of rock photographer Anton Corbijn and features a star-making performance from British unknown Sam Riley.

The ingredients are familiar a soupcon of sex, a dash of drugs, a blast of rock 'n' roll. But "Control," which opened the film festival's Directors' Fortnight on Thursday, is far from a standard showbiz biopic.

Shot in stark black-and-white and set in gritty, unglamorous 1970s England, it re-creates the life of a singer who died unhappy and almost unknown but has secured a place in rock mythology.

The part came out of the blue for Riley, 27, who had abandoned an acting career to take an unsuccessful shot at fame with his band 10,000 Things.

"I don't think we ever troubled the charts," he said drily.

When Riley heard about auditions for the film, "I was working in a warehouse in Leeds, folding shirts."

If the enthusiastic reception in Cannes is any indication, Riley can give up the day job. He is riveting as Curtis, an intense, charismatic performer who often appeared remote offstage.

Netherlands-born Corbijn, who turns 52 on Sunday, photographed Joy Division for British music magazines and went on to design album covers for Depeche Mode and U2. He said he knew as soon as he met Riley that he was perfect for the part.

When he moved to Britain in 1979, Corbijn said he was shocked by the country's austerity and poverty.

"A lot of bands I met, including Joy Division, were kind of underdressed a thin coat on, smoking and shivering in the cold," he said. "When I met Sam it was also in the winter and he was totally the same."

Pale and big-eyed, Riley resembles Curtis but more importantly, said Corbijn, he "had an innocence and a freshness that I was hoping for but never thought I would find."

Fans of music from the English city of Manchester, especially those who have seen Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People," will recognize the film's milieu. It is set in northern England in the late 1970s, a place of gray skies and grim prospects that produced a slew of original and innovative bands, from the Buzzcocks to The Fall.

One of the most original was Joy Division, which melded guitars and electronica with Curtis's baritone voice to create striking songs like "Transmission" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart." They never hit the big time. Curtis, troubled by a failing marriage and worsening epilepsy, killed himself in 1980, on the eve of the band's first U.S. tour.

Since then, Joy Division has been cited as an influence by Nine Inch Nails and U2, among others. The surviving band members went on to found '80s hitmakers New Order.

Adapted from a memoir by Curtis' widow Deborah played in the film by Samantha Morton "Control" is an intense but far from grim experience. Shot through with down-to-earth northern English humor, it features a soundtrack that runs from David Bowie and Roxy Music to the Sex Pistols. Joy Division's songs were convincingly re-created for the film by the actors, who all played their own instruments.

The other film flying the flag for rock 'n' roll at Cannes is the multicolored opposite of "Control." The rockumentary "U2 3D," which premieres Saturday, promises to let audiences see Bono, The Edge and bandmates, not only in color, but in eye-popping 3D.

Corbijn who captured U2 in black and white for the "Joshua Tree" album cover said he never considered shooting his Joy Division film in color.

"My whole memory of that period is black and white," he said. "There is basically no color photography of that band around. So it felt very proper to the project."

[MacGuffin]

Joy Division's tragic frontman rises again at Cannes

A searing biopic about the doomed lead singer of beloved British rock band Joy Division premiered in Cannes on the eve of the 27th anniversary of his suicide Friday.

"Control" by Dutch rock photographer Anton Corbijn tells the story of Ian Curtis, who cut his life short in 1980 while the band behind hits like "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was moving to the top.

Based on a book by Curtis' widow Deborah, the film revives the moody and magnetic frontman, played by Sam Riley of "24 Hour Party People," Michael Winterbottom's much lighter take on the legendary Manchester scene.

Corbijn, who has also directed rock videos for bands such as Depeche Mode and Nirvana, said he was drawn to the project because Joy Division's "industrial" sound, which rose from punk's still-hot ashes, literally changed his life.

"When 'Unknown Pleasures' (the Joy Division album) came out, I thought: 'This is so good that I have to go there and be where that music comes from,'" he told AFP in an interview.

"Every time I went to England, I found a quality in the people and in the photographs I took of these people that I couldn't have in Holland."

He said the Netherlands' wealth and generous welfare state meant that music was seen as more of a hobby than in England, which became a second home.

"It is different if you live in a very poor country and England was a very poor country, it was shocking in my life in the 70s," he said.

Corbijn, 51, said Curtis had lived for the stage at a time when his marriage to Deborah, played by Samantha Morton ("Minority Report"), ran into trouble.

"He was a quite normal guy in a sense, but with incredible gifts for poetry, a guy who showed very little of his inner demons apart from when he was on stage making music," he said.

"When he was on stage he became another person, he had a movement that's unlike anybody else."

Wracked with guilt and confused over an obsessive affair with a Belgian fan (played by German actress Alexandra Maria Lara), Curtis was also under massive pressure to break into the American market with an imminent US tour.

"Control" shows Curtis slip away at the tender age of 23, hanging himself just weeks before the darkly romantic "Love Will Tear Us Apart" became a radio hit.

Corbijn, who has also worked with bands such as U2, creating their iconic "Joshua Tree" album cover, said he aimed with his film -- shot entirely in black and white -- to capture the creative process.

"My pictures were never about the orgasm on stage, it's about the making, the creating of the song, the difficulties in life that prepare you to do something," he said.

"For me, that's where art comes from and I wanted to capture it. That was natural for me to do it this way. The movie is emotional, even for me when I watched it the first times."

He said that Joy Division's influence -- which carried on with successor band New Order -- could still be felt in the rock world.

"It has to do with the fact that Joy Division was never sort of a fashionable band at the time, their music stands through all those decades, because it's quite simple, honest, very beautiful and haunting," he said.

"It resonates still today, also what he sings about. If things are very personal, they always resonate. That's the great thing in Joy Division."

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: October 10th, 2007 (limited) 

Starring: Samantha Morton, Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, Joe Anderson, Toby Kebbell

Directed by: Anton Corbijn

Premise: Biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, from his teenage years through the rise of the influential band to his suicide on the verge of Joy Division's first American tour.

[MacGuffin]

[modage]

 

[MacGuffin]

'Suddenly the reality hit me'
How does it feel to watch the life and death of your father being re-enacted on film? Natalie Curtis, daughter of Joy Division singer, Ian Curtis, went on set, camera in hand, to find out
Source: The Guardian

I was about three when my mum first told me that my father, Ian Curtis - who died when I was one - was a singer, but it just seemed normal, like having an uncle who was a tradesman or whatever. I remember hearing Love Will Tear Us Apart on the radio and realising he was known in some way, but I never thought of him as famous. When I was growing up, neither myself nor my mother were in the public eye, and Joy Division were more cult than mainstream. The first time I heard their album Closer, I thought it was out of this world. I assumed all music was done with that level of style and intelligence. As I grew older, it was a shock to discover not everything was that amazing.

Initially I was dead against visiting the set of Control, the film about my father's life directed by photographer Anton Corbijn. Although it took my mother's memoir, Touching From A Distance, as a starting point, books are read in private, whereas a film is something much more public, an experience shared with an audience. When filming began in Macclesfield, I declined the opportunity to go. Macclesfield was somewhere I'd always associated with lush, green, rolling hills and I didn't want to associate it with a film about my father's suicide. Gradually my curiosity got the better of me, though; after all, I did study photography and am interested in film. Also, I felt that seeing the process would make it easier to watch the finished thing.

In July 2006 I went to Nottingham, where most of the film was being shot. I was on edge. It felt too weird. A bungalow had been given a 70s makeover to recreate my parents' engagement party. Of course, I've no idea how realistic it was, because I wasn't born. I first met Sam Riley, who plays my father, outside the bungalow. Sam looked really sweet with his 70s Ian haircut; as it was the pre-band Ian he was playing, he wasn't the Ian Curtis we all imagine. He felt a bit awkward at first, I think. But I had a sneaky cigarette with him, so when I saw that scene where Ian says, "You can't be in my gang if you don't smoke!" I couldn't help but giggle.

In between scenes, I was introduced to Samantha Morton, who plays my mother. Later that night we got a call to come along to a restaurant in some dark, trendy club, and afterwards we went to the flat where Samantha was staying with her fiancé. She held my hand as we crossed the road, just like my mum used to do when I was younger - I think the cast saw me as the baby of the set, because I am the baby in the film. Samantha didn't have on the Debbie wig when we met, but we talked until dawn about her role and I saw her notes - thoughts and reflections on how to play the character. She'd made them from my mum's book, but also from her own experiences as a mother. She had her daughter at a similar age to my mother when she had me. She also had a "Debbie playlist" - songs my mother would have listened to in 1980, such as Bowie and Durutti Column's Sketch For Summer, one of my own favourites. Every day before filming, Samantha would listen to the music to psych herself into character. Spending time with her had reassured me; I knew that whatever happened she'd do a damned good job, even if she didn't seem quite like my mother. Both she and Sam are in their late 20s playing my parents in their teens and early 20s, so they seem older. I think the film has made Mum slightly dowdier, too - I certainly don't remember her wearing such awful clothes.

It felt odder when they started filming the band scenes in a Nottingham pub that was supposed to be Rafters in Manchester, where Joy Division played. I've grown up with black-and-white photos of the band - probably what attracted me to become a photographer - but suddenly they were there in front of me in colour, in 3-D and uncannily accurate. Harry Treadaway - who plays drummer Steve Morris - had previously played guitar, but none of the others had played instruments before. They obviously worked hard at getting everything spot-on. Harry took me to lunch and told me he'd perfected his Macc accent by recording local lads in a bicycle shop. The "pretend Joy Division" even had banter and in-jokes like a real group, and called each other by their characters' names: Barney, Steve, Ian and Hooky.

We talked a lot about their roles; they were particularly interested in some research I'd done for the writer, Matt Greenhalgh. My father was diagnosed with epilepsy in January 1979, and looking into this for Matt gave me a real understanding of what he was going through at the time. There was more of a stigma attached to being epileptic then and people were a lot less well informed. My father also suffered from mood swings and depression. You read about mental health services being cut now, but God knows what it must have been like in the late 70s. There were loads of side-effects to his medication. It's likely that the epilepsy and the medication would have exacerbated the depression, although there was no provision for dealing with this.

People constantly ask, "Why did he kill himself?" To me it seems obvious - because he was really depressed. Bernard [Sumner, Joy Division guitarist] told me that my father used to drink before performing, which may explain his on-stage fits, because alcohol is a seizure trigger. Seizures can also be triggered by flashing lights, lack of sleep and stress. Ian's lifestyle and the tension caused by the disintegration of his marriage would not have helped. He did the best he could; he was just very ill.

I've never really felt angry at my father for committing suicide, nor was I emotional about it all being brought up in the film because it's been there every day for me, although I've not had a tortured life.

We had a lot of laughs on set, in the same way as Mum told me how there was always mischief around the band. One of my favourite moments was being an extra at the Bury riot gig scene of 1980. It felt strange shouting, "Fuck off!" at a pretend Alan Hempsall, the Crispy Ambulance singer who stood in for my father when he was too ill to go on stage, because I'd interviewed the real one in my research. I got caught up in the skinheads' fight and had a bruise on my foot for a month. The Strawberry Studios scene was special for me because I helped Harry discover how they made the famous drum sound in She's Lost Control. He explained that that "crrch crrch" sound was a combination of a syn drum and the sound of tape head cleaner being sprayed. It was a strange afternoon. Everyone was happy when it was all over, but I cried. Joy Division is not something that will ever go away for me.

At the wrap party it was interesting to watch the actors, who had felt like a real band to me, suddenly shaking off their characters. We were shown some rushes and the reality behind it suddenly hit me. There was a baby scene I found especially upsetting; everyone cheered and said, "That's you." I drank more than I normally would that night.

It was hard to watch the finished film, but it is just a film, after all. Toby Kebbell - who plays Joy Division manager Rob Gretton - is one of my favourites, but he's not how Rob was. Rob was always around, but in the last year of his life I worked in a nearby office and got to know him much better; he was so gentle and wise. I never heard Rob swear like he does in the film and there's a bit where he's mean to Alan Hempsall. Rob would never have been like that. I don't think the film captures how lovable Tony Wilson - the Factory Records boss who used his life savings to fund Joy Division's debut - was either. However, my mother and I agree with what Tony once said: if it is a choice between the truth and the legend, take the legend every time.

I miss Tony terribly and remember him arriving on set with his mad Weimaraner William bounding on to a scene and someone yelling, "Cut!!!" Four days after I saw the finished film, Tony died of cancer. So, a year after hanging out on set with a pretend Steve and a pretend Hooky, I caught up with the real ones, not at a glitzy film premiere but at a funeral.

I have mixed feelings about the film - I feel so excited for the band and the music, but repulsed by the idea of people watching a film about my family. It's probably the same for all those left behind. The band must have been very excited when the film got an ovation at Cannes, but it can't be comfortable watching people be very happy about sad things in your life. I felt sad reading recently that they said they feel guilty; but if anyone let Ian Curtis down, it was the NHS, not musicians too young to help.

Tony never got to see the film, but for me it is for him. It feels like Joy Division are finally going from being an enormous cult to a household name - just as Tony always believed they should.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[w/o horse]

This year is going to end nicely for me, and it's going to be on the strength of this and I'm Not There.

[Pubrick]

This year is going to end nicely for me, and it's going to be on the strength of thisThere Will Be Blood, Lust Caution, No Country For Old Men, Lake of Fire, Youth Without Youth Without Youth Without Youth and I'm Not There.

this was good to greatish good. the last act of the film goes on forever. it really hurts an otherwise perfectly performed and perfectly framed bio.

i can't stress how well the shots in this are composed. but i'm not sure if it means anything, probably not. at least a dozen times it did mean something. ESPECIALLY this really beautiful shot after morton gives birth and he walks outside for a cigarette. corbijn uses background action beautifully.. but i'm not convinced it means anything.

[SoNowThen]

You got to see it already???

Going on the trailer it looks SO DAMN GOOD it will be impossible for me to not love this. Unless, of course, it is (as claimed) "the coolest British movie of 2007", whatever the fuck that means. Maybe it's just me, but somehow calling a Joy Division biopic "the coolest British movie of 2007" just sounds really wrong in many, many ways.

[Pubrick]

You got to see it already???

it showed a couple months ago at the brisbane international film festival (not big enuff to warrant its own thread). i neglected to mention it earlier cos really, it was a lackluster year even for our humble standards. i forgot what else i saw.. oh yeah a couple of Buñuel films as part of a retrospective, and INLAND EMPIRE.

they always manage to show whatever film has won the palm d'or. if only a really brilliant film would win again.

incidentally this movie won the camera d'or, rightfully so as i mentioned.

[Reinhold]

i can't stress how well the shots in this are composed. but i'm not sure if it means anything, probably not. at least a dozen times it did mean something. ESPECIALLY this really beautiful shot after morton gives birth and he walks outside for a cigarette. corbijn uses background action beautifully.. but i'm not convinced it means anything.

i agree with your assessment. the whole thing looks like silver plate photography, too.

[picolas]

i really enjoyed it. (saw it at viff last night). Sam Riley perfectly captured this narcissistic and disturbed, yet poetic and magnetic person.. i wasn't familiar with Joy Division aside from Love Will Tear Us Apart but now i'm reading up on them/going through their stuff. and yeah, the film is candy for the eye. i suppose my one criticism is the rise to fame/downward spiral story itself has been done/is predictable, but it's a good story and this is among the best cinematic tellings of it i can think of.

edit: forgot to mention the manager character/actor was brilliant.

[MacGuffin]

Biopic Recalls Joy Division Singer

It was a handshake deal. Twenty-eight years later, it's led to "Control," the feature film about the life and suicide of Ian Curtis, frontman for the legendary Joy Division.

It was 1979 at a London tube station where the band's members and photographer Anton Corbijn shook after letting the then 24-year-old Corbijn do a 10-minute photo shoot and it became one of the most famous rock 'n' roll shots of that era.

By May 1980, Curtis was dead at 23. But by then, with just two full-length albums, Joy Division had changed music with their post-punk melding of dark, personal lyrics backed by a rigid, cavernous sound.

Corbijn went on to become a renowned photographer, creating indelible images of U2, Depeche Mode and R.E.M. He's also directed videos for those bands and others, including Nirvana.

On a 2005 DVD compiling Corbijn's music videos, Joy Division (and New Order) bassist Peter Hook said, only half-joking: "We made him what he is, you know? He'd be nothing without us."

The 52-year-old Corbijn told The Associated Press that he decided to make his feature directing debut because of "an emotional attachment to the whole story from my end, and I thought that would sort of compensate for any lack of knowledge about filmmaking."

"At the same time, I wanted to finish off an era of my life where everything I do is still driven by influences from my teenage years," he added. "So maybe it will cap all of that."

Corbijn's film is an unconventional biopic that focuses on Curtis' early marriage and harrowing bouts of epilepsy. Curtis' seizures (including one on stage) are presented as a major reason for his suicide, particularly considering the side effects of his medication, often mixed with alcohol.

"Control" has played to acclaim at various film festivals, including at Cannes, where the director received three honors.

Corbijn was adamant that "Control," which comes out in limited release Wednesday, not be a "rock film."

"It's really a film about a boy who had a dream and tried to fulfill his dream and then ended up somewhere where he was unhappy," said Corbijn. "It's a love story, and it has some great music. That's how I look at it, in that order."

Written by Matt Greenhalgh, the movie is based on the book "Touching From a Distance" by Curtis' wife, Deborah Curtis (played by Samantha Morton). The two married in 1975 and had a baby four years later. (Curtis, though, eventually began an affair with a woman named Annik Honore, who is also portrayed in the film.)

"Although I'd never met Anton before, that he was known to the band and had lived in (the) U.K. for so long seemed a huge advantage, less like having a stranger come in," Curtis told the AP.

The role of Curtis eventually went to Sam Riley, who was found by an open casting call. Riley, himself a front man for the band 10,000 Things, previously only had a brief role in "24 Hour Party People" a coincidence since that 2002 film chronicled Factory Records and the Manchester music scene of Joy Division and other bands.

Speaking by phone from London where he's shooting his next film, Riley said: "I couldn't believe he had given me the opportunity. He couldn't believe, from what he's told me, that he managed to find what he was looking for: an unknown who was capable of singing and smoking a lot of cigarettes."

Riley studied the little available footage of Curtis with a particular eye to mimicking his distinctive, arm-swinging dance. Since it was one of the few things people immediately recognize about Curtis, it was key to creating authenticity.

"I was also nervous about these types of films, being a musician and having watched a lot of these things," said Riley. "They're difficult to get right without being corny."

Corbijn credits the actor for making the movie "better than I had hoped for."

Shot in black and white, "Control" mostly has music that's performed on-screen and for those scenes, Riley and a band played the music themselves, live for the camera.

"When I heard the music coming from the drums and the bass and the guitar behind me, from the real band, it just clicked," said Riley. "We felt like `channeling' somebody sounds so pompous, but I was no longer thinking about it."

Corbijn initially was reluctant to make "Control," wary of again being pigeonholed (as he has in his photography) as connected only to music. He also expected it to be his only film, but the experience has made him eager to make more films.

Though "Control" closes a chapter of his life, it has opened a new one as a filmmaker.

"You come out of it and you have something," he said. "That was one of the greatest things in my life."

[MacGuffin]

The Cult of the Lads From Manchester
By DENNIS LIM; New York Times

IAN CURTIS, the frontman of the beloved post-punk British band Joy Division, has been dead 27 years, longer than he was alive, but his moment in the film spotlight has only now arrived. Mr. Curtis hanged himself on May 18, 1980, two months shy of his 24th birthday and on the eve of what would have been his band's first American tour. The Joy Division story, a sacred narrative to legions of cultish fans (and a natural for the movies, complete with doomed, charismatic hero), is now the subject of two new films, the biopic "Control" and the documentary "Joy Division."

Both were made with the cooperation of those who best knew Mr. Curtis. "Control," the feature directing debut of the portrait photographer Anton Corbijn, is loosely based on "Touching From a Distance," a 1995 memoir by Mr. Curtis's widow, Deborah, of their life together. "Joy Division," directed by the music-video veteran Grant Gee and written by the author and critic Jon Savage, takes a panoramic approach, combining archival footage with revealing interviews of firsthand observers and Mr. Curtis's surviving bandmates, who went on to form New Order.

In Mr. Corbijn's film, as in Ms. Curtis's book, the other members of Joy Division, which formed in Manchester in 1976, recede into a blur. The story homes in on Mr. Curtis's personal pain: his struggles with epilepsy, overmedication and a guilt-inducing love triangle. By contrast, what emerges in "Joy Division" is a picture not just of Mr. Curtis and his band, but also of the social and existential conditions that produced them. The music's coiled, haunted sound and nihilist lyrics, the documentary argues, are inseparable from the decaying postindustrial dystopia that was Manchester at the time.

The two projects, which evolved separately, are complementary but also work in similar ways. Intentionally or not, both return a mythic figure to life-size proportions.

The Weinstein Company is releasing the two films, having acquired "Control" at the Cannes Film Festival in May and "Joy Division" at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. ("Control" opens Wednesday at Film Forum in Manhattan. No release date has been set for the documentary.)

Mr. Corbijn's hefty résumé includes four coffee-table volumes (mostly of celebrities and rock stars) and dozens of music videos for the likes of Depeche Mode and U2. But before "Control" he had no feature film experience. Speaking at the festival in Toronto, he said he had initially turned the project down but changed his mind, figuring that an "emotional connection to the material" would serve him well on his first feature. Born in the Netherlands, Mr. Corbijn, 52, was drawn to London in his early 20s by the flourishing music scene and, in particular, Joy Division.

Within two weeks of relocating there, he had tracked the band down for a shoot and taken what is perhaps the most defining photograph of Joy Division: the members walking into a tube station's neon-lighted tunnel, Mr. Curtis looking back at the camera.

Like that image — and many others of Joy Division — "Control" is in black and white. "That felt like the proper approach," Mr. Corbijn said. The covers for "Unknown Pleasures" and "Closer," the group's two studio albums, use black and white imagery. And an inky, gloomy palette, Mr. Corbijn added, corresponds with his memories of '70s England.

Ms. Curtis's book was the primary basis for the screenplay, but Mr. Corbijn and the screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh also wove in details of Mr. Curtis's affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian journalist. It took some persuasion before Ms. Honoré would talk to the filmmakers, but she eventually assented and even shared letters that Mr. Curtis wrote to her, heard in voice-over in the film.

Samantha Morton signed on to play Deborah. For Ian, Mr. Corbijn chose Sam Riley, 27, who had previously appeared in a few bit parts but was folding shirts in a warehouse when he landed the role. For Mr. Riley, whose magnetic performance is the film's scarred heart, playing Ian Curtis was a draining feat of psychological immersion and physical mimicry. He had to enact the grand mal seizures that plagued him as well as the manic, uncoordinated flailings that were his signature dance moves. (Filming the scenes between Ian and Annik were easier because "I was falling in love in real life," he said. He and Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Annik, are now a couple.)

To populate the concert scenes in "Control," the filmmakers rounded up Joy Division fans, which did not exactly calm Mr. Riley's nerves. "It was big pressure going out there and having 150 extras discussing my merits and my failures," he said. To make things trickier, the actors in the band were also performing — not simply miming — Joy Division originals.

Mr. Riley, who had briefly been the singer in a band called 10000 Things, could manage a credible copy of Mr. Curtis's hectoring baritone, but the other actors were essentially learning to play their instruments (not unlike Joy Division in the early days). "We practiced for hours, between rehearsals and late into the night," Mr. Riley said.

"Control" and "Joy Division" are both necessarily elegies, not merely to Mr. Curtis but also to a host of people and places that are no longer around. "To be brutal about it, the equity of Factory is death," Mr. Savage said, referring to Factory Records, the now-defunct label that made its name with Joy Division. In addition to Mr. Curtis, Rob Gretton, who managed Joy Division and New Order, and Martin Hannett, the producer responsible for the band's crystalline studio sound, are also dead. Tony Wilson, the mythomaniacal founder of Factory, a producer of "Control" and the subject of Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People" (which touches on the Joy Division story), died in August.

As with other rock star suicides, Mr. Curtis's final hours have been sifted for clues, retraced in near fetishistic detail. He was found dead by Deborah in their kitchen on a Sunday morning. The night before, he had gotten drunk, argued with her (she left), watched Werner Herzog's "Stroszek" on television and played the Iggy Pop album "The Idiot." As depicted in "Control," which largely resists the temptation to assign blame or explanations, his suicide seems an impulsive act. "I think it was a moment," Mr. Corbijn said. "I don't think it was planned."

The documentary, even less willing to indulge in the romance of suicide, doesn't get into Mr. Curtis's death until late in the film. "The ultimate romantic application of the myth is that Ian validated his art when he died," Mr. Savage said, adding in no uncertain terms that he thought it was nonsense.

In a sense, the process of stripping the myth away from Ian Curtis began with his widow and her plaintive, clear-eyed book. Ms. Curtis has stayed out of the publicity glare surrounding "Control." Despite being credited as co-producer, she has not attended premieres or spoken publicly about the film until now. She recently consented to an e-mail interview.

Ms. Curtis said she spent a few days on the set and observed most of the scenes that were filmed on location, often right outside the house where she and Mr. Curtis had lived in Macclesfield, a town near Manchester. She was rendered "pretty much speechless," she said, meeting Ms. Morton. "I think she plays Debbie in a forceful way. Samantha became the strong, determined woman I always wanted to be." Meeting Mr. Riley, especially in character as Ian, was harder. "I didn't know where to begin to talk to him really," she said. "I think the difference is that Samantha could empathize with me and Sam's role required him not to."

Watching the shoot naturally stirred up mixed emotions. "Part of me didn't want to see the wedding scene," she said, "especially as it was filmed outside the very same church" in which she and Mr. Curtis were married in 1975. She was present for the filming of one of the most painful scenes: as Ian and Debbie walk home from a party, he matter-of-factly tells her he no longer loves her.

"I felt emotional, not for me, but for the characters in the movie," Ms. Curtis said. "It really was like watching someone else. And in that way I suppose it was a kind of release."

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Music to Brood by, Desolate and Stark 
By SIMON REYNOLDS; New York Times

THE mystique surrounding Joy Division has always been way out of proportion to its record sales. Far bigger bands, like the Clash and Pink Floyd, are still waiting for their biopics, but this post-punk cult band from Manchester, England, has two to its name. The first, the bright, hyper-active "24 Hour Party People," from 2002, couldn't be further in mood from the lustrous monochrome and stillness of the new film, "Control."

"Party People" wasn't entirely devoted to Joy Division. (The lead character was Tony Wilson, Factory Records' co-founder and a patron and champion of the band.) But it's hard to imagine that movie getting made without the aura and international name recognition supplied by the band and its doomed frontman, Ian Curtis.

The Joy Division legend is based partly on the enigma of Mr. Curtis and his dramatic exit in 1980, a suicide that terminated the band's life, too. (Its members had vowed to drop the name if any member quit.) But it's also founded on the power and originality of Joy Division's music. Listening to the band's two studio albums, "Unknown Pleasures" (1979) and "Closer" (1980), which will be reissued on Oct. 30 by Rhino, what's most striking is how harsh the music is. This is a sound with the mettle to match the unflinching view of the human condition presented by Mr. Curtis's lyrics.

Bernard Sumner's guitar sounds as if it has been chipped out of granite; Peter Hook's bass playing is fluent but unyielding, like steel cable. In performance, as documented on the live recordings packaged with these reissues, Joy Division's dense assault approaches heavy metal. But its studio music was stark and desolate, permeated with a cavernous spatiality courtesy of the brilliantly inventive producer Martin Hannett.

Joy Division's unsettling combination of the visceral and the ethereal has hooked generation after generation of listeners. New Order, the more commercially palatable and dance-oriented (yet still angst-tinged) outfit that the band became after Mr. Curtis's death, has helped maintain Joy Division's profile. As with the Velvet Underground, Joy Division's name has been kept alive by the vastly more successful groups it influenced, like U2 and the Cure, which have paid it public tribute.

Joy Division helped spawn the Goth movement (countless sepulchral singers have copied Mr. Curtis's doomy baritone drone), and you can spot its stray chromosomes popping up everywhere from emo to the more melancholy strains of metal. Most recently, Joy Division-indebted outfits like Interpol, Bloc Party and Editors have refocused attention on post-punk, that late 1970s, early '80s era of musical experimentalism and lyrical innovation in which Joy Division assumed a central role.

Crucial to Joy Division's allure is Mr. Curtis's bleak glamour. There were a relatively small number of photographs taken of him (many by Anton Corbijn, the director of "Control"), keeping his charisma — the faraway eyes, the Eastern bloc image of long gray raincoat and short hair — ageless in black and white. And his lyrics boasted an unusual combination of unflowery directness and mysterious poetic depths: "A cry for help, a hint of anesthesia/The sound from broken homes" (from "Colony"). Mr. Curtis's despair has a perennial appeal to sensitive teenagers confronting for the first time the possibility that life is meaningless. At some point between "Unknown Pleasures" and "Closer," fans and critics began to treat Mr. Curtis like a seer: a New Wave equivalent to Jim Morrison, but with the balance shifted from Eros to Thanatos. (The Joy Division songbook is remarkably devoid of sex, not to mention humor.)

Then Mr. Curtis's suicide transformed him into something like a martyr. This notion of singer as fallen savior was played up in Mr. Corbijn's 1988 video for the re-released single "Atmosphere," in which a procession of cowled monks carry a gigantic photograph of Mr. Curtis.

"Control" resembles an expanded remix of that black and white, Bergmanesque clip. But a full-length movie can't rely on the power of pure imagery the way a video can. Mr. Corbijn obviously needed to somehow "explain" Joy Division. One approach he might have taken would be to situate the band's music as the product of a time and place: late-'70s Manchester, a declining industrial city in the rainy, grey-skied northwest of England, its landscape blighted with derelict factories and cleared lots.

But "Control," for all its unstinting attention to period detail, barely mentions the group's sociopolitical context. Instead Mr. Corbijn opts for biography, presenting Mr. Curtis's increasingly out-of-control life — his disintegrating marriage and a guilt-racked affair, the conflicting pressures of impending fame and a rapidly deteriorating epileptic condition — as the truth behind Joy Division's songs.

All this makes for a compelling story, but it has distinct limits as a prism for understanding Joy Division's music. Mr. Curtis's songs are existential rather than autobiographical. Rarely straightforwardly drawn from his life, his lyrics strip away the everyday details that observational songwriters use to impart a sense of lived reality. In his songs, ordinary life achieves an epic grandeur (hence their perennial fit with the wounded narcissism of adolescence). But there's no bombast or emotional theatrics; instead there's a modernist starkness as pared down as a Samuel Beckett play.

These lyrics are all the more effective framed by music that has the hard-rocking power of the Stooges but is too repressed to actually rock out. Another problem with tying Joy Division's impact to the specifics of Mr. Curtis's life is that during the group's lifetime, hardly any of it was public knowledge. Few outside the Factory Records milieu were aware of his marital problems. It's only since the publication of "Touching From a Distance," the 1995 memoir by his widow, Deborah Curtis, on which "Control" is largely based, that his personal trials have become widely known. The foundations of the group's enduring cult were laid during a 15-year period in which Mr. Curtis really was an enigma.

Yet there's one crucial factor mentioned in "Touching From a Distance" that "Control" strangely ignores: Mr. Curtis's romantic fascination with rock stars who died young. In the book Ms. Curtis writes that her husband told her he had "no intention of living beyond his early 20s." This apparent death wish suggests that amid the depression and confusion, there was an aesthetic component to his fatal decision. From his teenage infatuation with glam rock to the attention he paid to record design, Mr. Curtis appreciated the power of gesture. Because his suicide preceded the release of "Closer," it determined the album's immediate reception and its long-term resonance. (In "The Eternal," the narrator watches a funeral procession — his own?) It could be that Mr. Curtis planned it that way. He played a major role in choosing the album's cover, a photograph of a sculpture tableau in a cemetery of the dead Christ surrounded by mourners.

At some gut level, Mr. Curtis understood that rock is all about myth. From the start, he was driven by a fierce ambition to become precisely the kind of edge-walking rock shaman that he ended his life as. The manner of that ending sealed the deal, giving Joy Division's music an appalling gravity and — for better or worse — an undeniable authenticity.

Joy Division assimilated the desolation of its environment and the dislocation of its era and gave it a somber glamour. The barren beauty of that landscape of sound captured how lots of people felt at that late-'70s moment: the dawn of the Thatcher-Reagan era, a freshly frigid cold war with renewed anxiety about Armageddon. But tension and dread are far more the norm than the exception, which perhaps explains the time-defying and endlessly renewing appeal of Joy Division.