Sam's the man taking Control

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Sensation: Low-budget British movie Control charts Joy Division star Ian Curtis's tragic last years

Honourable effort: Sam Riley with film maker Anton Corbijn

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A warehouse worker is being tipped for stardom after winning rave reviews for his portrayal of Ian Curtis in a new biopic of the troubled Joy Division singer.

Young British actor Sam Riley has received critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival for his role in Control, which charts the rise of the Manchester band and Curtis's suicide.

The £3 million movie, which is one of the few British productions at this year's festival, sees Riley plucked from his job folding shirts at a warehouse in his home town of Leeds to take up the role of the charismatic frontman of the band behind songs such as Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Riley, 27, was in the little known band Ten Thousand Things and played Mark E Smith of the Fall in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, which was also set in Manchester.

His co-stars in the new film are Samantha Morton who plays Curtis's wife Debbie and Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays a journalist with whom he had a relationship.

The remaining Joy Division band members, who later re-formed as New Order, praised the film after flying to Cannes for the premiere.

Director Anton Corbijn said: "New Order hardly agree on anything, but they all agree that they love the film ... It was my first movie and people are often frightened of that. But it is a very English story."

REVIEW
Control
***
Cannes Film Festival
By Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard

If Ian Curtis and Joy Division changed the face of rock music in the late Seventies, you wouldn't know it from Anton Corbijn's Control, a naturalistic black and white summation of the short life of Curtis which was the first of only two British films to make the festival's programme this year. It's much more about the man himself.

But at least the film, made by a Dutchman who lives and works in Britain, was accorded the honour of opening the Directors' Fortnight, where it received a warm welcome.

Curtis, who killed himself aged 23 just before the band was to tour America for the first time, is strikingly played by newcomer Sam Riley. The film is taken from the book by Deborah Curtis, his wife.

She is played by Samantha Morton and her performance as a simple but not stupid provincial girl is perfectly judged throughout.

Curtis, a gangling, taciturn if talented boy from Macclesfield, married her young, had a child and then regretted it when he met Alexandra Maria Lara's attractive part-time rock writer.

His suicide is ascribed in the film partly to the guilt he felt at neglecting his wife and child, partly to the weakening effect of his epilepsy and partly to the fact that he seemed only able to express himself properly through his songs, and in a way that proved a huge strain.

That he killed himself was a tragedy that hasn't much connection to the usual drink and drug deaths of rock stars, but was possibly sadder.

Corbijn, who has made a number of music videos, is one of the few first-time feature film-makers who can throw off the techniques of that genre.

The film pays tribute more to Ken Loach and Mike Leigh than any pyrotechnical display. But this thoroughly honourable effort still needs a bit more flair, of the kind punk chronicler Julian Temple might have given it over two hours.

Corbijn, however, allows several of Joy Division's most memorable post-punk numbers with Riley approximating angstridden Curtis songs better than one dared hope. That's clearly when he came alive, and it's to Riley's credit that he plays the other tongue-tied and shy young Northerner that Curtis was off the stage equally well.

Corbijn sticks as close as he can to the facts and, considering the constraints of a small budget, marshals them well. The downside is that the pacing is pedestrian and the drama tends to suffer as a result.

 

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