Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division film, 2007
Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007) follows Ian Curtis from Macclesfield rooms to Joy Division’s short public life. Shot largely in black and white, the film treats the band’s rise as documented work: rehearsals, gigs, TV, and the weight of epilepsy and a failing marriage. Sam Riley plays Curtis without impersonation gimmicks; the focus stays on pressure and routine.
Corbijn had photographed Joy Division in the late 1970s, so the visual brief is not borrowed nostalgia. Factory Records, Tony Wilson, and the Manchester circuit appear as workplaces, not myth props. The soundtrack leans on the catalogue and on performances that sound close to the records without turning the film into a jukebox.
The film does not soften Curtis’s decline. Seizures, touring strain, and the pull between home and the road stay on screen. Deborah Curtis’s memoir Touching from a Distance supplies much of the spine. Viewers looking for pure hagiography leave disappointed; those wanting a clear timeline of how the band worked get one.
Some people visit the past for sentimental reasons and some people visit the past to understand the present better.
(Anton Corbijn, 2007)
Control became the default screen entry point for Joy Division for a generation that never saw the band live. It sits beside the records rather than replacing them.
As a rock biopic it keeps craft in view: how a singer, a label, and a small northern scene produced songs that still get covered. The ending is known; the film’s job is to show the work that led there.
