Anyone who's into moody alternative rock knows the story about Ian Curtis. He was the singer for a band called Warsaw, who later changed their name to Joy Division. They released one album called Unknown Pleasures to critical acclaim, started to become popular, and were poised to go on a tour of America. Things were scuppered, however, when Curtis was unable to cope with personal problems, and killed himself. The band had accumulated enough recorded material, however, to release 'Closer' posthumously, which makes everyone concerned with it regard it as Curtis' personal suicide note. It was after that that the band decided to carry on, renaming themselves as New Order. Sound familiar?
A few things about this film:
a) The actors in this film looked almost exactly like their real life counterparts. You think Val Kilmer looked like Jim Morrison in The Doors? That likeness has nothing on how much Sam Riley resembles Ian Curtis.
b) The film didn't deify Curtis in the way that many journalists and artists are irritatingly prone to doing. It presented him as flawed, struggling to deal with the circumstances imposed on him in a less than ideal way.
c) In spite of the fact that the film makes Manchester (and Macclesfield in particular) look as grim as shit, it still comes across as interesting, and somewhere I wouldn't mind visiting.
The film was based on the book written by Curtis's widow Deborah, Touching from a distance. I never bought it, but read through most of it when it was on sale in a bookshop near where I lived, years ago in Dublin.
I didn't have much sympathy for Ian Curtis after reading the book. He came across like an egotistical prima donna, and an unstable father figure to boot. The latter is where I draw the line: Once you have children, your live is no longer your own and you have a duty to other people (the main reason why I will probably never opt for parenthood). He didn't really seem to care about his wife either.
But of course flicking through a book doesn't give you the proper picture, and the film helped put his life into perspective a bit more. I didn't know about the extra-marital affair, and I didn't know about how his epilepsy only started to figure in his life at the same time as his band were starting to take off. His appointment with a neurologist was interesting. Standard guidelines on prescribing didn't really exist back then, so Ian simply had a bucket of anti-seizure medication thrown at him, and told to get on with it. I've seen people struggle with an ongoing course of Carbemazapine, one anti-seizure medication. Curtis (if I remember rightly) had three to deal with, as the doctor adopted a sledghammer-to-kill-a-fly approach. This was where he started to get my sympathy.
All things considered, I can now kind of appreciate where it all came from. He had problems imposed on him - some of his own making, some not - and finds it too much to bear. He gets married at an age that would now be considered ridiculously young, and then decides to have a child almost on a whim. I get the feeling if he waited and got his head together, he would have made a better fist of his life, but instead he goes ahead and takes all this responsibility at a time when he should be cutting down on his stress levels. He has an affair with a woman, and then falls in love with her, and finds himself unable to finish it, in spite of his wife issuing him with ultimatums. Top this all off with the fact that he's not exactly swimming in money, and you have some idea of what he's going through. And so he decides not to hang around.
Other than that, you get a good insight into how the machinations of a local music scene works. Their manager was desperate for someone with talent to look after, because nothing was going to happen for him of his own accord. I remember when I was growing up, my brother was a roadie for a popular local band. Their songs were good enough, but egos and in-fighting fucked it all up before they could even get a record deal, and they've all since moved onto sensible jobs, though not without having a laugh along the way. One thing I remember was the older musos hanging around them, people who had never made it themselves and looked just too plain grown-up to be involved with that kind of thing, but didn't really have any other options open to them. There were a few people in this film like that.
One other thing I knew nothing of was how Curtis used to work at employment exchange, and seeing him having to deal with people on their terms rather than his own was funny.
Lastly, I was always a bit dubious about some of Joy Division's music. I felt that they walked a fine line between atmospheric and turgid, and only really started to get things fully right in their incarnation as New Order. It was only in the last while that I realised that there were some undeniably good songs in the back catalogue of the beleagured former though, I can't take that away from them, and they certainly offered a blueprint from which just about every 90's miserablist claims to work these days.
