Control ***1/2

Most music-world biopics aim to mythologize their subject - the tormented artist with humble roots who rises to greatness, captures the hearts and wallets of millions, and then dies in some terrible plane-crash/ drug-overdose/freak-accident-with-a-garden-gnome way.

Control, Anton Corbijn's terrific film about Ian Curtis, lead singer of the '70s U.K. band Joy Division, will have none of that. Shot in wide-screen black and white (the Dutch-born Corbijn is a photographer making his directing debut) and propelled by a series of dark and fitful pop gems, the movie examines a life - and a death - without getting deep about it. The result is oddly exhilarating.

Curtis, played with eerie exactitude by Sam Riley, was a brooding English kid who smoked cigarettes, wrote poetry, and lip-synced to David Bowie and Lou Reed, shimmying at the bedroom mirror - another pasty teen in a glam-rock trance. But as his school days neared an end in lovely Macclesfield (a grim northeast English town), Curtis fell into a band - a band whose name was taken from a World War II Nazi brothel.

Gigs ensued. A record deal was made. Two studio albums later, at age 23, on the brink of stardom, Curtis hanged himself in the tiny rowhouse he shared with his wife and their baby girl. The next day the group was set to embark on its first tour of the States.

Curtis had epilepsy - a diagnosis that came after a couple of scary mid-song seizures on club stages. One minute he'd be flailing his arms like a schizoid robot, intoning (or monotoning) the rumbling lyrics to "Love Will Tear Us Apart." The next minute his eyes would roll back in his head and he'd be on the floor, quaking, sweat-soaked.

The Joy Division numbers in Control are performed by Riley - who fronted his own outfit, 10,000 Things - and the three actors portraying his band mates (one is Joe Anderson, who sings Lennon and McCartney in Julie Taymor's Across the Universe). The original Joy Division recordings can be heard over the end-credits, and they're different - the real Curtis' voice was tinnier - but the fact that the actors are singing, playing the instruments, gives the film an authenticity, and energy, that even the most expert miming would have lost.

Based on a memoir by Curtis' widow, Deborah (Samantha Morton), Control offers a view of a young artist caught between rock and a hard place: domesticity. But it's more complicated than that - Curtis' day job was as a low-level government bureaucrat; there was something in him that needed order, a desire for the mundane.

But he also wanted to be a rock star, and was on his way there, signed by Factory Records' founder Tony Wilson (the subject of Michael Winterbottom's glorious 24 Hour Party People), with the fame, fandom and groupies that come along. Curtis' affair with a pretty Belgian rock journalist (Alexandra Maria Lara) made everything messier, as did the drugs he was taking for his epilepsy, and the drink he was taking for, well, the drink.

Control doesn't claim to know the reasons Curtis killed himself. The act of suicide poses the question why, but rarely answers it, leaving the living to wonder, and to grieve.

And there's certainly grief to be had in Control, but also joy. Really.

Directed by Anton Corbijn. With Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Alexandra Maria Lara and Joe Anderson. Distributed by the Weinstein Co.

Running time: 2 hours, 1 min.

Parent's guide: R (drugs, drink, sex, profanity, adult themes)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse EndText