There's not a shot in Anton Corbijn's new movie Control that isn't a beautiful black-and-white photograph. Muted in color, and in drama, too: Corbijn scrupulously downplays the drama of making a band; there's no awkward first rehearsal, no working-out of the first single or album; little excitement of early shows, or any of the drama that fans usually crave in band stories. In one scene, our man Curtis is singing along with the radio; in the next he's putting himself forward for frontman, in the next they're playing a gig, and minutes later they're on TV, all with little fanfare. This low-key dramaturgy lends appeal to Curtis and his friends: they're not whores for fame, and nor are they self-effacing anemics, disdaining society. Slightly melancholy, adventurous chaps, they'd like to be famous, they're playing it cool, and they're making some music.

I'm a Joy Division ignoramus, but this film made a believer out of me, like Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell), the amusing manager, who, after his first gig, grabs the band, throws up his hands and says, "I am a believer in Joy Division, hallelujah." Not least among the seductions here are the production values: previously Joy Division sounded thin and spare to me, but in this film the songs have a rich tone, deftly adapted from lo-fi punk to crisp electric New Wave as the band gets into better studios. And Corbijn's eye comes in handy here, too—witness the brief sequence in a studio where the drummer adds a rhythmic white noise to a track by expressing an aerosol can on beat: Pssht, pssht-pssht... pssht, pssht-pssht. The music is modern and creative in a way I hadn't imagined before; it yearns, mellow and fresh.

It's not quite clear why Curtis feels the desperation that leads him to take his life at 23. To be certain, he's pressured: a wife and baby, a lover, the demands of fame, and his epilepsy. But given the story we're told, it seems he could have made some compromises: maybe a divorce, maybe cut off his lover, maybe toned down the rocking-out, or found a way to deal with the epilepsy. He doesn't seem driven, over the top—not a Jimi Hendrix pushing himself to the edge—if anything he's quite temperate, but then, morose. Is something missing from the story? Maybe so: the film is from a book by Debbie Curtis, his estranged wife. But then, maybe not: maybe this is a story, not unfamiliar to us in the Letters-Unknown family, of a young man with everything, who just doesn't feel it, just doesn't feel loved and free, just doesn't have the brain chemistry or the special, mysterious ingredients that make life really sing, sustainably.