I never really "got" Joy Division. I never forgot seeing some live footage of them and Ian Curtis' epileptic jigging, but as for the music it left me strangely cold. To be honest it bored me- and largely still does. But the new film Control, about Curtis' life and death, is a minor masterpiece. Shot in dull black and white, and featuring a claustrophobic Manchester 70s milieu to pile drive home the message of isolation, this is one trip that isn't bad so much as sad. Curtis' talent is so natural and redolent of despair that he is almost the ultimate white bluesman, twitching like an old TV picture, staring into himself and I guess life with a gaze locked down for survival. Sam Riley, as Curtis, summons a very lonely lad, without laying on any gratuitous existential crud. The known ending has all the surprise of death in life, a kind of tidy inevitability. It doesn't matter that Curtis died young because in the film at least he never seems young at all, and towards the end merely an arrested corpse.
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