Control

Review Anton Corbijn's Joy Division biopic is a triumph of understatement but a major cinematic triumph, nevertheless.

Sam Riley and Alexandra Maria Lara portray rocker/poet Ian Curtis and his mistress, Aneeka Honore.

Audiences have become so accustomed to cinema as a medium of action that it is easy to forget that some of the most truthful moments in movie history are those in which action is all but absent: Janet Leigh as Marian Crane driving away from the scene of her crime in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, staring ahead at the road - guilt, fear and tension gathering by the second; the poetry of the opening sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris - the audience gazing through a rain-pelted windscreen as a car enters a neon-lit Moscow to the somnolent rhythm of the windscreen wipers sweeping the glass; and, more recently in There Will Be Blood, the stunning shot of Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview sitting with his adopted toddler on a train, the two staring into one another's eyes with a love so clear and deep that the entire artifice of cinema dissolves before us.

Now, we can add, however improbably, the scenes in Anton Corbijn's Control of Sam Riley as a teenage Ian Curtis, the eventual lead singer of Joy Division, lying on his bed in his parents' home, staring at the ceiling and taking long drags on a cigarette. The camera does not linger too long, just long enough for the audience to ponder what might be going through the young man's mind, what thoughts bring a spark of tortured intelligence to his young eyes.

It's something that viewers will ponder time and again throughout the film's 117 minutes and if the film's depiction of Curtis's short life is at all authentic, it is something that even those who knew him well must also have asked themselves. If there is any clue to what made Curtis tick, it comes through his lyrics and his on-stage performances, certainly not through what comes across as a stunted ability to interact socially.

Shot entirely in black and white by the first-time director Corbijn, Control exudes a kind of cool melancholy that can, at times, make the film both difficult to watch yet difficult to distance oneself from. It's not that Curtis is such a likeable character. There are times when he is anything but likeable. Yet, we are unable to dismiss him in large part because Corbijn approaches his subject almost as a documentarian, his camera unflinchingly recording preludes to certain disaster as Curtis inexorably crushes the hearts of those who love him most. He angers us but many viewers will, no doubt, experience a sense of familiarity.

In a nutshell, Curtis's life story as told in Control follows the biopic formula of the tortured artist. He proposes marriage to his sweetheart, insists they have a child together and then loses interest as life in the band opens up vistas he never thought possible. It's not that he's caught up in the glamour of the lifestyle; Joy Division's gigs were mainly in dingy clubs with crowds that, at best, numbered a couple of hundred. Joy Division, though quite different musically, came out of the same mould as the Sex Pistols, the progenitors of a movement that sneered at the idea of musicians as fan-trawling megastars. But for a small-town boy who held down a job as an employment counsellor for the disabled, the admiration of even those small groups must have brought realisations of what might be possible. Then came the TV appearance, the record contract, the Belgian mistress and, unfortunately, the epilepsy that required a drug regimen nearly as debilitating as the disease itself.

Given what is really the ultimate banality of Control, its success rests heavily on its actors. Here there is little to criticise and much to praise across the board. For Riley it is, to use a cliché, a breakout performance (he is currently at work on Walter Salles's On the Road, playing the beat author Jack Kerouac), and Samantha Morton is painfully credible as the suffering wife, Debbie Curtis, on whose book, Touching from a Distance, the film is ostensibly based. Alexandra Maria Lara, a Romanian actress with a long career in Germany, is both loveable and hateful as the other woman. The other three members of Joy Division, played by Joe Anderson, James Anthony Pearson and Harry Treadaway, are excellent and all bear striking resemblances to the real members of Joy Division.

Control is, of course, from that most dreaded of genres - the biopic. And there are liberties taken with events to make it all fit nicely into a two-hour running time. But there is not one wasted second in this film, even when nothing is happening.