There have been many portrayals of Ian Curtis on screen, most notably in Michael Winterbottom’s Twenty Four Hour Party People, but Riley’s performance surpasses all previous incarnations. Newcomer Sam Riley gives an electrifying performance as Ian Curtis. Curtis is also fully aware of this and his self-assurance is evident as he carves his name into his desk, transforming the ‘N’ into an ‘M’ so that it reads ‘I AM’. The camera isolates him within scenes, establishing him as someone distinctive, like a diamond in a sea of coal. This sense of finding poetry amongst the grime and dirt of the everyday is mirrored by the character of Curtis himself. The film is firmly rooted within the social realism genre as endless rows of terraced houses and billowing chimneys evoke comparisons to the ‘kitchen sink’ films of the 1960s, such as A Taste of Honey but Corbijn’s monochrome photography elevates these mundane images and endows them with a transcendental beauty so that they become almost magical. His decision to film entirely in monochrome is also immensely rewarding. His background as a prestigious photographer is highly apparent every scene is so fantastically framed that the images wouldn’t look out of place in a glossy magazine. This is Corbijn’s first feature film but it does not show. It is therefore incredibly fitting that the photographer responsible for creating this mesmerising image, Anton Corbijn, has decided to direct this latest biopic of the troubled Joy Division singer.Ĭontrol documents the remarkably short life of Ian Curtis from his Bowie-obsessed teenage years and the formation of Warsaw, who then became Joy Division, through to his well-documented suicide at the age of twenty three. The haunting image of a brooding Ian Curtis smoking a cigarette whilst staring defiantly out of the cover of the NME has become one of music history’s most iconic images. Cast: Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Alexandra Maria Lara