Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) is about 18. He lives with his parents in Macclesfield, England, in a massive suburban housing complex with rounded safety windows that look like 1960s TV screens. He goes to school, but sits through his classes in a near fugue state. One day he brings home a vinyl copy of Aladdin Sane, which he listens to whilst wearing a fur coat over his bare chest, and simultaneously smoking and applying eyeliner. In the middle of this ritual, a friend comes over with a girl. The girl and Ian lock eyes in Ian’s bedroom mirror while she’s making out with his friend. After the girl and the friend leave, Ian sings along with David Bowie and plots stardom, imagining himself the toast of New York’s Warhol-centric counterculture. A star is born … and doomed.

Anton Corbijn’s Control smashes the music biopic mold by portraying the star at its center not as a mythological creature, but as a real-life, fucked-up kid in over his head. The Joy Division frontman’s talent doesn’t drop out of the sky; it’s something he keeps to himself until, after enough practice in front of the mirror, he’s sure he’s got it right. Likewise, his tragedies are almost entirely of his own doing, born from a borderline pathological desire to seize control of himself and the world around him, and exacerbated by his immature inability to do so. Particularly in the balance it finds between transcendence and dread in suburban family life, Control has a lot more in common with the British realism of the films of Mike Leigh than it does with even the recent wave of rock-star-as-antihero pics like Walk the Line. Corbijn’s actors, particularly Riley, hauntingly recreate the band’s image and sound, but the director is really only concerned with the milestones of the band’s career in so far as they give him an opportunity to talk about Curtis’ personal struggles.

The real Curtis hung himself in 1980 at the age of 23, after completing two records with Joy Division, just days before the band was to embark on their first U.S. tour. It was Curtis’ second attempt suicide in a matter of weeks, and Corbijn pegs Curtis black despondency on his literal inability to go home again. Days after locking eyes with Debbie (Samantha Morton) in his teenage bedroom, the two are covertly holding hands and sneaking off to a David Bowie show together; months after that, they’re married, and before Ian hits the age of 20, they have a baby girl. Debbie is a sweet, lumpy, nerdy girl, prone to wearing caftans, and soon enough Ian’s forcing her to go to bed without him while he stays up late drinking, watching TV Westerns, staring off into space, and scrawling lyrics. Soon after that, Ian begins seeing Annik, a black-turtlenecked Belgian fan he meets on tour. Unable to choose between his wife and his mistress, Ian falls into a cycle of self-punishing despair, which resolves itself in epileptic seizures.

These turn of events seem to stem less from the reckless influence of love, and more from Ian’s need to assert himself over his weaker admirers. Over and over again, Corbijn shows Curtis to be the world’s most passive sadomasochist, which plays itself out most clearly in his relationship with Tony Wilson. Despite the fact that his band makes music that sounds like The Buzzcocks on sedatives and underwater, Curtis flirts with Johnny Rotten-like punk-rock bravado. The band lands a record contract when Curtis hands the Factory Records impresario a note with four words scrawled on it, two of which are “Joy Division” and one of which is far too dirty for this publication. Soon Wilson swears to sign a contract in his own blood if the band will join his label, which Ian enforces.

Just how desperate for control is Ian Curtis? So much so, the movie seems to hint, that Curtis’ epilepsy may have started as an attention-grabbing affectation before developing into a real infliction. His first seizure in the film doesn’t happen until after he’s witnessed someone else’s, and even then, it only occurs when Curtis is already visibly upset at having lost control of a situation. At this point, we’ve already seen Curtis’ stage “dance”, which looks something like Mick Jagger leading a marching band on meth; as the film progresses, Ian’s act begins to more closely resemble his fits, until the two crash directly against one another to the crowd’s delight. The seizures eventually compound Curtis’ depression, but whether it’s clinical epilepsy or something more psychosomatic, Corbijn doesn’t make clear. This ambiguity works to the film’s advantage: we’re never forced to feel sorry for Curtis because he’s sick, but we’re also never able to completely condemn his selfishness.

The film is most powerful when Corbijn, a sometime director of music videos for U2, Depeche Mode and The Killers, builds narrative scenes around Joy Division songs, thereby imbuing these hallmarks of punk-era anomie with new relevance. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (which, with its peppy instrumentation and desperate lyrics, could not be a clearer influence on Morrissey and The Smiths) is cast as the soundtrack to a manic mission to reveal infidelity; “Isolation” is an exquisite but severe cry for help from the recording booth. Curtis allegedly took as much vocal inspiration from Frank Sinatra as from David Bowie or Iggy Pop, and in certain scenes, Control feels very much like a Sinatra-era film in punk clothing; Riley’s Curtis is ultimately a crooner, revealing and commenting on the film’s major themes by performing within it.

We’ll have more on Control in an upcoming episode of ReelerTV from Toronto. The film hits US theaters on October 10.