Control

I'm not much of a movie reviewer, and this isn't really a review.

When I was a kid my favorite books were biographies. Biographies written for children are pretty useless because everyone is a hero even if in real life they were drug addicted pedophiles with tails because those things never get printed for the below grade 7 crowd. I grew up with a very skewed view on what accomplished people lived like, for the longest time it never dawned on me that Eleanor Roosevelt was probably a lesbian.

My interest in the lives of others does not stop at the printed page. I love the biopic. Mostly because I really do not want to read the life story of David Hasslehoff or Joan Van Arc, but I might watch 10 or 15 minutes of it while channel flipping.

First let's talk about Dewey Cox. Walk Hard is a very goofy take on the biopic. The brilliance of this film is simple: Take a formulaic genre (biopic) and follow the formula to a T - then throw in some close up full frontal male nudity - hilarious! The thing about Walk Hard is that once you see it you will compare every biopic you have seen (and will see) to it...and you will also realize that Ray wasn't all that great of a movie.

This biopic is different in that our lead character's life story starts at age 17 (1973) and he doesn't accidentally lose a sibling to a horrible farm accident nor is he angrily compared to a better sibling nor is he abused. He isn't even living obviously below the poverty level - he is just a regular kid of that time and class in England. He's listening to David Bowie and Roxy Music and smoking cigarettes and experimenting with make-up and writing sad poetry and having seizures...

Here's where the needle skips across the record.

About 3 years later in a double wide trailer in the rural dispatches of Arkansas I too would be listening to David Bowie and Roxy Music and experimenting with make-up and writing sad poetry and having seizures. The major difference here is that my poetry was sad and HORRIBLE! Where Ian Curtis was a junior genius. And I never got into cigarettes.

When Ian lands in the hospital after a particularly violent convulsive episode he is diagnosed with epilepsy. He is given a myriad of pharmaceuticals in hopes that one or a combination will stop or at best reduce the frequency of the seizures. All the pills have British names so they were unrecognizable to me, but I imagine that one was Dilantin and another was Phenobarbital because a few scenes later Ian can hardly function and is caught napping at his job. The lesson here? Rock Star lifestyle a day job and epilepsy do not mix...

In my Phenobarbital days (ages 13 - 22) I was so cloudy. I did spend a lot of time zoning out. Phenobarbital did not control my seizures (because I would find out MUCH later that my seizures were not epileptic in nature). All it did was make me tired and cranky and I think is rewired my brain. I think that stuff effected my reasoning skills. I was angry that I had to take it. And I was depressed. I was just sad all of the time. Sad and mad. I believe the effects lasted for decades even after I stopped taking it.

If Ian truly was on the various amounts of pharmaceuticals as portrayed in this film - plus the exhaustion of a Rock Star lifestyle, not taking the drugs regularly, keeping up a wife/baby (although it doesn't look like he was trying too hard at that) and entertaining a girlfriend - it is no wonder he hanged himself. It is quite possible that the same drugs that were meant to keep him alive are what killed him. I wasn't doing anything but going to school and being a teenager/young adult and I could hardly function. This guy had real responsibility at a really young age.

Control is a very subtly played biopic in that some things are just not gone on and on about or pointed to with big flashing signs and ridiculous dialogue. Oh, it has it's moments - because it is a biopic - but much of this movie seems graceful and lazy - almost like it is on Phenobarbital. It does have a montage, a pretty accepted biopic maneuver - but how else are you going to tell the story? Ian had a very short life - he died at 23 - and yet even a short life is hard to pack into 100 or so minutes of film. I didn't learn anything of substance I didn't already know, which was pretty basic, about Joy Division or Ian Curtis. Maybe there isn't really that much more to know. But it was a nice reminder of how young he was, even though his voice seemed much more experienced in life.

Joy Division weren't around for all that long and Ian killed himself just as they were taking off. Even if there isn't that much more to know - there's so much left to wonder.

I can't think of a way to bring this back to Dewey Cox...