Control

Yeah, really very beautifully shot, no doubt. But ultimately it runs into the same problem that almost all musician bio-pics tend to run into, or troubled genius bio-pics run into, which is that it focuses too much on the turmoil in his life to the exclusion of his artistic life. Not that there should be less of a focus on his life. In fact, I do think that specifically for this movie at least, one of the things that it does right is that it doesn't really forgive Ian Curtis for being an asshole. (Even better, it also never really condemns him for it. It does really a pretty good job of letting us see how much of an asshole he ultimately is being while also allowing us to see how from his perspective he's just in an impossible situation and he doesn't know what to do about it.) Further along those lines, it does manage, mostly, to not add a whole bunch of extra symbolic meaning to Curtis's suicide. It kind of just seems like a particularly jack-assed thing for him to have done, in the end, and you don't really get a sense that he thought he was accomplishing much of anything by it. So, anyway, it does those things right. But it also falls into this very common trap of not portraying the creative process at all. Which I could forgive the movie for if it had at least tried, but it doesn't even care to look especially like it's tried. We see at the beginning that Curtis is a kid with exceptional musical tastes and capable of quoting Wordsworth and stuff, but he doesn't really ever talk about music with anyone and he doesn't really do a lot of writing throughout the movie. It's just like, he goes to a Sex Pistols show, then he tells the New Order guys that he should be their singer, and the next thing he's singing these amazing songs, and we're left to wonder where they've come from. It's like he just decided to be the singer in a band and all of a sudden he's singing songs. We don't even see him figuring out how he wants to sing or anything. (Also, the staged performances are really pretty spectacular. They almost make the movie worth it. Or they almost make up for the movie's giant gaping flaw.) And the fact that they didn't even try to put any of that creative process into the movie ultimately makes me assume that the director just must not have been very interested in it, which makes me not like him a lot, and made me spend a lot of the movie griping to myself that it was kind of a waste of time.