Control (2007)

Anton Corbijn's Control arrives in black and white, fitting for a film with almost no interest in the color of anything, least of all its cast. The ensemble is drawn entirely from the real white Mancunian figures of the late 1970s post-punk scene, and no effort is made to diversify the historical record. Race never surfaces as a subject. This is a period portrait of a specific milieu, and it stays inside that milieu without apology. Questions of sexuality go unraised. The environment does not come up at all. A small punk sneer at the record industry flickers past, a blood-signed contract, a manager's bluster, but it never builds into an argument about capital. The film is too busy watching a man fall apart.

That man is Ian Curtis, and the film's emotional engine is his epilepsy, the seizures, and the phenobarbital haze that dulls him into a stranger. The screenplay treats this as medicine and tragedy. It does not recast his condition as a celebration of neurological difference, and it does not lecture about it. Samantha Morton's Deborah, drawn from her own memoir, is granted real interiority and screen time, but no thesis about patriarchy arrives with her. She is a woman watching her husband vanish, and that is the whole of it. The punk ethos glances at Factory Records and the machinery of touring, then goes quiet.

Corbijn is a photographer, and he shows rather than tells. This is the rare music biopic with no sermon in its pocket. It bends facts, as the surviving band members have grumbled, but it bends them toward mood, not toward a modern ideological reading of the past. No address is made to the audience. No moral is delivered from the wings. Nobody tries to make 1980 speak in the vocabulary of the present. We watch a young man who cannot control his body, his marriage, or his future, and a camera patient enough to hold still while he loses all three. A somber, well-made picture. The cultural syllabus will survive without it.