Control

Joy Division filmed by someone who was there

Control follows Ian Curtis from Macclesfield rooms to Joy Division’s brief public life. Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film keeps the camera on the pressure: the work, the illness, the strain at home. Shot largely in black and white, it treats the band’s rise as documented work: rehearsals, van rides, television spots, the weight of epilepsy, and a marriage under strain. Sam Riley plays Curtis without impersonation gimmicks. The likeness is enough. The film stays on the routine, and on the breaks.

Corbijn had photographed Joy Division in the late 1970s, so the look comes from those years, not from a later nostalgia kit. Factory Records, Tony Wilson, and the Manchester circuit appear as workplaces, not shrine props. The film leans on Deborah Curtis’s memoir Touching from a Distance for much of its spine, which means the domestic life is not a subplot pasted on after the gigs. Home and stage keep pulling against each other. Neither one ends up feeling safe.

Music sits at the center without turning the movie into a jukebox. The soundtrack draws on Joy Division’s catalogue and on performances that sound close to the records: the bass line of Transmission, the cold pace of She’s Lost Control, the bare vocal on Love Will Tear Us Apart. Corbijn lets songs arrive as work the band is still learning to carry in public. When the group plays, you hear why those tracks mattered on small stages before they became posters. Bernard Sumner’s guitar, Peter Hook’s high bass, and Stephen Morris’s drums stay audible as a unit, not as a costume for Riley’s face. The performances are not karaoke copies. They are a young band working out a shape that already feels too heavy for the room.

That is the subject, once you set aside the usual tragic-frontman framing. Control watches how a singer, a label, and a small northern scene produced songs that still get covered, while the private cost of that production stays visible. Seizures interrupt touring. Letters and silences interrupt love. The decline is not softened for drama. Viewers looking for pure hagiography leave disappointed; those wanting a clear timeline of how Joy Division worked get one.