Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Control
Directed by Anton Corbijn
B-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Oct. 26

Released as we (impatiently) await the wack experiments of I'm Not There and Walk Hard, Control is the musical biopic par excellence--almost. The subject is Ian Curtis (unknown Sam Riley), the doom-and-gloom lead singer of Joy Division who hung himself on the cusp of their first American tour and the release of their second album Closer.

Curtis was already covered, if briefly, in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, which wisely offered up no answers for his suicide. Who could ever know what was going through his mind? Best not to try. Control does try, in a very Psych 101 fashion, and even has that whole tiresome, reductionist rise-and-fall trajectory about to be heroically eviscerated by Walk Hard.

What it also has, fortunately, is director Anton Corbijn. A photographer and sometime music video maker best known for the cover of U2's The Joshua Tree, Corbijn snapped Joy Division back in the day, usually framing them in stark B&W images against the industrial bleakness of their native Manchester.

For the most part, Matt Greenhalgh's script for Control--based on Touching From a Distance by Curtis' widow Deborah, here played by Samantha Morton--is nothing to write home about. But Corbijn films it like one of his JD photos come to life. Like Riley's Curtis, we're trapped in a terminally gray and foreboding wasteland--virtually a postapocalyptic vision.

This isn't just a stylistic gimmick--it's a sensibility, and it seeps into the film's every pore. Joy Division's star may rise, but their fame is almost entirely off-screen. Corbijn films the whole of their first TV appearance head-on inside the studio, stressing the disconnect between their performance and those watching them.

We see only a couple live performances, and they're either unbearably raucous or end with the epileptic Curtis suffering a seizure. Shy of scoring a hot Belgian mistress (Alexandra Maria Lara), Curtis never gets to enjoy the benefits of his music, or escape the stark 'Scope B&W. It's all the same, only worse.

Marky narc: Wahlberg (left) again plays a cop, here with Alex Veadov, in We Own the Night.

Corbijn lets this flatness eat away at what should be a standard music biopic, though surely even Walk the Line's James Mangold would have resisted cueing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" when Riley casually informs Morton he no longer loves her. Likewise, only a sadist would play the devastating "Atmosphere" ("Don't walk away/ In silence ... ") after Curtis has strung up the noose. As Curtis, Riley is like a half-formed human, struggling to learn how to exist. For better and worse, so too is Control.

Leroy "Nicky" Barnes has been called many things. The Black Godfather. The Al Capone of Harlem. And yes, Mr. Untouchable. His multimillion-dollar heroin empire in 1970s New York has been immortalized in rap songs, the media and now movies. (Cuba Gooding Jr. plays him in next month's American Gangster).

Today Barnes has a $1 million contract on his head. Or so Marc Levin's documentary brags before showing Barnes on film in a secret location. Clutching the bosom of the witness protection program, the crime boss-turned-informant can't show his face (likely altered by surgery), so the film dwells on him fiddling with a cigar, a chessboard and a bullet while recounting his exploits.

He's not alone. The cast of interviewees includes Barnes' former lieutenants and dealers, his ex-wife, his lawyer and the undercover DEA agent and informant who helped bring him down. Together they tell of a Harlem drug addict who used his canny business sense to become the mafia's go-to guy for flooding black neighborhoods with heroin.

Barnes weaseled his way out of trials until Jimmy Carter read the New York Times Magazine cover story that coined "Mr. Untouchable." Laws were passed that would keep Barnes behind bars, and he was soon found guilty of various drug conspiracy charges and sentenced to life. Then he sang--not to cut a deal but to exact revenge on his partners, who'd already begun to undermine him. His federal testimony led to scores of arrests and convictions, and Barnes served only 21 years.

Levin navigates the film stylishly to a soundtrack of vintage funk, but it'd be just another nostalgic rise-and-fall saga (think: Blow) if not for Barnes, who shows no remorse for the killings he ordered, the wife and friends he betrayed and the damage wrought by all that heroin. Rather, he quotes the Koran, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Moby Dick, spouting self-aggrandizing, hypocritical decrees.

It's scary--and fascinating--just how hardened Barnes is. "I'm out. They're in," he says of his old gang, some of whom are still doing time. He uses the word "innovation" when describing his approach to dealing, and fondly recalls womanizing and drug-enhanced orgasms. The film doesn't attempt to moralize, but simply lets Barnes dig himself in deeper.

On a dimly lit Connecticut road, a cute little boy--busy idyllically releasing fireflies from a jar--is plowed over by a marauding SUV, which then peels off. The deceased's father (Joaquin Phoenix) waits for the police to locate this hit-and-runner, his blood ever boiling, while the hit-and-runner himself (Mark Ruffalo) is eaten away by guilt, even as he's unable to summon the courage to turn himself in.