"Control"

This picture about Joy Division's Ian Curtis is one of the most beautiful movies ever made about rock 'n' roll.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Ian Curtis (Sam Riley)

Oct. 10, 2007 | In the upstate New York city I grew up in, in the late 1970s, there was a radio station that played what it called "the music of your life." The fact that I can't for the life of me remember what kind of music this station played -- Old Patti Page songs? All Creedence, all the time? -- proves that whatever it was, it sure wasn't the music of my life. The format was surely designed for someone else: Woodstock types who, figuratively speaking, couldn't bear to shower off the mud; balding, ancient married geezers who liked to sit in the dark and think about the bobby-soxer who got away. The music of my life -- at that point, at first, it might have been Chic or Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band; later, it would be the Clash or Elvis Costello -- was still being written. It was evolving, it was alive. When you're young, nostalgia is someone else's hang-up; it's like the futuristic moving sidewalks in "The Jetsons" -- it might show up in your lifetime, but you really can't picture it.

If you're over 30 -- or even if you're not -- you know what happens next: You can't hang onto youth, but you can hang onto music, and so, at least in some small way, most of us do. The trick is to guard against blind nostalgia, to open yourself to the possibility that the music you loved when you were 20 can still mean something when you're 45. Perhaps it can mean even more.

Anton Corbijn's "Control" tells the story of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the revered Manchester post-punk band Joy Division. Joy Division -- its other members were Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris -- made only two albums before Curtis killed himself in 1980, on the eve of the band's first U.S. tour. Before Curtis' death, Joy Division was virtually unknown in the United States, even though their following in the U.K. had been growing steadily. By the time most people stateside started paying attention to them, Curtis was gone. But both his story and the band's music -- darkly glittering songs that sounded majestic rather than self-indulgently world-weary -- were compelling enough to earn Joy Division a passionate following. The fact that the band's surviving members had regrouped as a very different band, New Order, made the saga even more magnetic.

"Control" will certainly mean something to people who consider Joy Division part of the music of their lives. (I stand accused.) But the picture is so beautifully made, and so sensitive to its subject, that I hesitate to set it before my fellow late-baby-boomers as just a nostalgia trip: In addition to being one of the most beautiful movies ever made about rock 'n' roll, it also works, quite simply, as a story about a gifted and deeply troubled young guy who just couldn't hold it together. Sometimes the stories you think you've heard a million times before are merely universal.

The picture opens in Macclesfield, Manchester, in 1973: A skinny kid, all long limbs and concave angles, makes his way home through the town's modest streets full of working-class flats and houses. He's got an LP tucked under his arm (we'll later learn that it's Bowie's "Aladdin Sane"), the international symbol, as readable as the stark figural outlines used to mark men's and ladies' rooms, for teenage escapism, for the way pop music grants you the freedom to become, at least temporarily, someone else.

That kid is the young Ian Curtis -- he's played by a musician and actor named Sam Riley, in a marvelous debut performance -- and he does many of the things kids of his class and generation tended to do: He and his friends take whatever drugs they can get their hands on, generally cadged from the medicine cabinets of old-age pensioners. He meets and falls in love with a local girl -- actually, he steals her from his best friend -- a quiet but slyly intelligent young woman named Deborah (Samantha Morton, whose performance is heart-rending and raw). And after being inspired by a Sex Pistols show, he starts a band with his mates (played by Joe Anderson, James Anthony Pearson and Harry Treadaway). They call themselves Warsaw at first, but eventually change their name to Joy Division (a reference to the brothels in which Nazi soldiers were serviced by female concentration-camp prisoners). Meanwhile, Ian and Deborah have gotten married: He's 19; she's 18. One day he blurts out, "Let's have a baby!" and her response, after only the briefest pause, is "OK" -- a shorthand expression of the way the most momentous decisions in life can be made in the time it takes to unwrap a stick of gum.

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