"Hell shaped room"

Rating: 8/10 (9 April 2008)

In 1979 a young Dutch Photographer called Anton Corbijn heard an album called 'Unknown Pleasures'. Within days he had left Holland and headed for England intent on locating the makers of the record. He found them in Macclesfield and, with a series of monochromatic images, began to forge their legend.
A scant eighteen months later the group were considered one of the most important bands of the post punk era. On the eve of the release of their second album, their biggest hit single and an American Tour, their lead singer hung himself in his kitchen. The first rock and roll suicide - he was twenty three.
Corbijn went on to have an amazing career in which his photography and video promos resulted in much of modern rock's iconography via his work with U2, Depeche Mode, The Rolling Stones and many others, and now, finally, he has come a full circle with his directorial film debut telling the story of the band which brought him to England in the first place.
The band was Joy Division. The film is Control.
Control is the biopic of Joy Division's lead singer; the charismatic but deeply troubled Ian Curtis. Joy Division had emerged from the fallout of the late 70's punk explosion. Taking the inert nihilism of that new sound and instilling it with an intellectualism far removed from the cheap shock tactics which sold it to teenagers everywhere, Joy Division, with the visionary brilliance of producer Martin Hannett, developed an oeuvre of dystopian soundscapes which continues to serve as a ground zero for new music to this day.
Based on the book 'Touching From a Distance' by Curtis' widow Deborah and starring newcomer Sam Riley in the lead role, Control does as much to dismantle the Curtis cult as it does to propagate it. The sleek futurism and Ballardian preoccupations of the music are in stark contrast to the kitchen sink dour-ocity from which it emerged. Control is a rock and roll 'L Shaped Room' or 'Look Back In Anger' with an epileptic Jimmy Porter dumping his trumpet for a Vox Phantom guitar. Terrifying evocations of Curtis' jerking, trance-fixated on-stage persona, juxtaposed with his day job at the local job centre or making cups of tea in the mannered surroundings of his small council house is as far removed from our perception of Curtis the uber-prophet of urban ennui as can be imagined. Think Bowie trying to set the video recorder or Lou Reed doing the washing up.
The musical sequences deftly convey the chaos and excitement of the band's live appearances thanks to Riley's convincing portrayal of Curtis but Tony Kebbell as Rob Gretton, whose introduction and pronunciation of himself as the band's new manager, is the highlight of a film which may be too drama-heavy for fans and, perhaps, too long for everyone else. Nevertheless, Control is a crash-course in the banality behind the bombast and the dissection of a myth. Tony Wilson, owner of Joy Division's record label Factory is often quoted as saying "if it comes to printing the truth or the legend, always print the legend". With Control, Anton Corbijn has managed a collision of both.