Star Rating: ****

Shot in black-and-white, photographer turned director Anton Corbijn's biopic of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis looks like a digitally-enhanced kitchen-sink drama from the fifties. Samantha Morton, playing Curtis's wife, Debbie, could have stepped straight out of a long line of heroines to the nappy bucket born. Yet the world Ian Curtis inhabited and Corbijn recreates is Macclesfield in the post-punk seventies. After a Taste of Honey, get a gobful of angst.

Curtis was to a certain generation what Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were to others - a live fast, die young merchant destined to exist forever in legend. To his admirers this was not just a lead singer in a band but a poet and tortured soul whom love tore apart at the age of 23. Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People merely nodded to Curtis's story. Control takes the myth and looks hard, sometimes very hard, at it.

It follows Curtis from his schooldays when he and Debbie met, through their marriage, to him joining the band and finding success. During his time with the band two events occurred which, the film suggests, led to his suicide: he was diagnosed with severe epilepsy, and he fell in love with someone else. Facing a medical condition that distressed and debilitated him, and torn between two women, he had, quite simply, lost control, an extraordinary man felled by ordinary twists of fate.

Corbijn's determination to play the story straight has not prevented him from turning in a hugely stylish, and at times very funny, portrait of a man, and a band, on the run. It's all here - the camaraderie, the fighting, the borderline insanity. At the centre of it all, bearing a spooky resemblance to Pete Doherty, is Sam Riley playing the haunted Curtis, and the always-out-of-step Debbie, Morton taking what could have been a pathetic character and affording her a quiet dignity.

Then again, the film is based on Debbie's book. At heart this is a love story, told from one side, that's full of fondness, regret and hints of lingering anger.

More than a tale of two people (three, if you include the mistress), it's a declaration of affection for the times. As a result, one wonders what younger audiences will make of it. The wonder of stories such as Curtis's, however, is that, like their subjects, they never grow old.