The short, sad life of Ian Curtis ... but the music's great

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2008)

Joy Division passed me by. I was never much into bands being a singer/songwriter kind of guy, (give me Joni and Mr Dylan any day). Then I heard 'Love will tear us apart' on an ad of all things and I was hooked. Of course, I knew who Ian Curtis was and that he had committed suicide and that like so many rock stars who had died young had gone on to become something of a legend to his followers. I knew less, (zilch, in fact), about Aton Corbijn, the photographer who had chronicled a number of bands, (most famously, U2), in his photographs and whose links with Joy Division were formed long before this movie.
This is Corbijn's debut feature and he has made a fine job of it. The film is unremittingly bleak as it follows Curtis and the band through the initial throes of success to the depression that would finally claim his life and like the photographs with which Corbijn made his name it is in black and white. (It has the grimy feel of the kitchen-sink movies of the sixties). The gloom is lifted by the expressive music of the band, here brilliantly recreated by the cast and in particular by the extraordinary performance of newcomer Sam Riley as Curits inhabiting the role as if to the manner born, apparently, both on stage and off. I doubt if fans will be disappointed.
Likewise the chameleon-like Samantha Morton perfectly encapsulates the role of Curtis' wife from star-struck teenager through an unstable marriage to motherhood and it is on the book which Deborah Curtis wrote that the film is based. It is a dark film in every sense but Corbijn and Riley imbue its hero with a real compassion which makes the tragedy of his short and talented life all the more moving.