Unknown at the time, Sam Riley’s striking resemblance to Ian, along with the choice of he and castmates Joe Anderson, James Anthony Pearson, and Harry Treadaway to learn and perform the songs live, immerses you even deeper into the authenticity of his brilliant and intuitive performance. Echoes of what might have been linger in every stunning black and white frame, and through it all you feel as if you’re watching his life unfold from across the street instead of from the solemn divide of decades. Set against the backdrop of Joy Division’s rapid rise to fame, it follows Ian and Debbie’s (Sam Riley and Samantha Morton) love story and the deterioration of his mental and physical health as his battle with epilepsy casts a shadow of despair over everything. Like its source, the film is an intimate look at the events of Curtis’s life from 1973-1980, compiled from the collective memories of those who were there. Knowing how the story ends does not prepare you for it when it comes. Released in 2007, Control is one of the most unconventional, sincere, and utterly devastating biopics I’ve ever encountered. Responsible for some of the earliest and most iconic photographs of the band, it seems fated that Corbijn’s first feature would pay tribute to the memory of Ian Curtis. Like many others, Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn was captivated by Joy Division's haunting sound, inspiring him to relocate to England in 1979 after the release of their debut album, Unknown Pleasures. Yet, even with time and distance, it’s clear their recollections offer no solace or resolution to why the gifted frontman of a group on the brink of international stardom chose to abandon it all at the age of twenty-three. Published fifteen years after Ian ended his life in the couple’s Macclesfield home, on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour, the biography pieces together Debbie’s memories with those of Ian’s bandmates and closest friends to tell his story. “I believe Ian chose his deadline,” Deborah Curtis writes of her husband’s suicide on in Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. “Touching from a distance, further all the time.”
In the process, I hope to unveil how these two vastly different mediums work together to tell the same story, from cover to credits.
In this column, I’ll be checking out old and new adaptations to further explore both sides of that experience.
#CONTROL IAN CURTIS LEGENDADO MOVIE#
As a lifelong bookworm and cinephile, I've discovered that whether I read the book before or after seeing the movie can have a profound influence on my enjoyment of the story across both mediums. While we've all uttered some version of this sentiment at one point or another, there have been those rare occasions when the opposite is true. "Don't judge a book by its movie" is another common jab. "The book was better" is a phrase heard often in conversations about book-to-film adaptations.