Signalling a Kitchen-Sink revival?

Rating: 6/10 (8 October 2007)

Anton Corbijn polished his craft as a stills photographer, and this film's greatest strength lies in its visual quality. Nearly all of it works as a series of animated stills. It certainly could not have done so well in colour: the director's experience shooting in mono for the music press (the 'inkies'), including of course the real-life Joy Division, and his professed admiration for early Ken Loach films, especially 'Kes', comes through clearly.
Michael Winterbottom has already covered a little part of the Ian Curtis story in '24 Hour Party People', including his suicide when 23. Matt Greenhalgh has said he was sorry to have missed the opportunity to write the script for it. As he is a Manchester guy he was the director's and producer Orian William's popular choice to write the screenplay for this one. The curious link here is that Craig Parkinson, who plays impresario Tony Wilson, the central figure in 'Party People', looks more like his impersonator Steve Coogan than the man himself, who, although he died before this film was finished, co-produced it with Curtis' widow Deborah. Toby Kebbell, truly unrecognisable from 'Dead Man's Shoes', puts so much meat into his portrayal of the band's manager, incidentally, that it's possible to re-imagine the whole saga being told from his point-of view, as some kind of very black comedy.
Much is made of the extraordinary contrast between musicians' day-jobs and rock 'n' roll stage personas: Curtis worked, neatly brushed and keen, in an employment exchange until the sun went down and he made his dreams of Gothic, sci-fi and beat poet imagery come alive on stage. Sam Riley has been touted as a 'non-actor' (another nod to Loach) but he handles the Jekyll and Hyde task very well. The gig scenes are convincingly handled, (something Antonioni, for instance, made such a mush of in 'Blow-Up') although a brief appearance by John Cooper Clarke the 'punk poet', playing his much younger self, just about blows everything else off the stage. Curtis got married young, to a local girl (Samantha Morton in yet another sublime disguise) but fell for Annik (Alexandra Maria Lara), a skinny and dangerous Other Woman from Belgium. It was being torn between these two beauties that inspired his most famous song, and combined with epilepsy and chronic stage fright that contributed to his suicide.
Before he became epileptic himself, he witnessed a job-seeker he was interviewing, suddenly having a major seizure. It's shown mostly from his point-of-view. It's an important event to include - he wrote 'She's Lost Control' about it - although misunderstanding about epilepsy is so widespread that it's feasible to expect some of the audience to go home thinking he 'caught' it.
The overbearing feeling of this film is of a Kitchen-Sink revival, albeit widescreen, and that's not just because of the monochrome. Just to top that, the final scene, as Ian Curtis leaves by way of the crematorium, of oil black smoke rising up to fill the sky, may be a reference to the milieu where the original concentration camp joy division had to work as sex slaves; although it has strong similarities with Charles Foster Kane's big finale.