Anton Corbijn is truly gifted at routinely fucking up things near and dear to my heart.

My first experience with the now-acclaimed director was in college. It’s a long story, but you can deal. Once upon a 1980’s, like most other alterna-teens of my era, I loved me some industrial music. Nothing worked better to piss off the parents than Al Jourgensen screaming “love is like a butcher knife” or an impromptu singalong to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult’s A Daisy Chain for Satan. (“My friends turn me on! I live for drugs!” C’mon, Mom & Dad, join in!)

Back in the days when Mario Bros. really DID seem Super, industrial music sounded like it had just arrived from Planet Cool — and better yet, Whitesnake fans Just Didn’t Get It, making it all the cooler. Yet almost as fast as it took off, the scene disappeared from pop culture’s landscape. Did evolving technology sound the death knell? Was it yet another repercussion of Hurricane Nirvana’s grungy landing on our Western shores. Me? I’m convinced that MTV killed the industrial scene.

Problem was, while industrial music sounded like pure fucking evil with a dance beat, it was primarily made by chubby, awkward-looking Belgians who all resembled big Hawkwind fans. This sort of shit did NOT translate well to the MTV generation. No matter how cutting edge the song, if you looked like wayward members of Belgium Chapter 301 of the Jethro Tull International Fan Club, you were done. That’s why, in the early 90’s, the upper eschelon industrial bands threw all their money and might toward video directors in a hail mary attempt to look as cool as they sounded. Some pulled it off — you know them today as Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Most didn’t, and shuffled right off to oblivion.

Me, I was a huge fan of the Belgian industrial outfit Front 242. And when it came time for MTV to air the video for their masterstroke, “Headhunter,” I was psyched. It was a piercing tune with wicked beats and appropriately vague and nefarious lyrics about bounty hunting, so the video had plentiful opportunity to kick multitudes of ass, right? The band entrusted their breaththrough to up-and-coming Dutch music video director Anton Corbijn.

Corbijn took stock of the situation, knew the job at hand… and then filmed the band playing with eggs. They eat eggs, they spit out eggs, they throw eggs — all while leggy supermodels wearing giant egg shells parade by in the background. It was incredibly inappropriate and thoroughly non-sensical (and eventually explained as Corbijn’s misunderstanding of the English song lyrics.) Yet, strangely, the whole affair was somehow artsy — mostly due to Corbijn’s penchant for posing his subjects starkly amid unfocused backgrounds and grainy film.

And that’s been Corbijn’s modus operandi for years – grainy film, sharp contrasts, and artists placed in uncomfortably inappropriate settings. Some call it art. I’ve never understood it. Ooh, here’s Depeche Mode dressed as cowboys. Ooh, here are The Killers in fake moustaches. And my absolute least favorite video of Corbijn’s? Joy Division’s “Atmosphere.” Shot posthumously on the release of a Joy Div greatest hits package, the video features blown-up posters of frontman Ian Curtis being carried about ceremoniously by a pack of Jawas — perhaps to be one day explained as Corbijn’s misunderstanding of Star Wars. Either way, it sucked (in an artsy way.)

So when I heard that Corbijn was making a feature film based on the autobiography of Curtis’ widow, I was less than thrilled. Strangely, though, “Control” WORKS. Anton, you’re off my shit list for once.

Joy Division are the sort of band that, if you’re a card-carrying member of Hipsters Anonymous, you’re simply required to like. They were goth before goth, emo before emo, techno before techno — all wrapped up in a charming bow of tragedy that would, were they not now 30 years in the past, be the sort of thing that Hot Topic managers would salivate over. Band comes along, band revolutionizes world sonically, tortured frontman offs himself so as not to witness remainder of band sing “Love’s got the world in motion” a decade later. It’s the sort of story that makes people write books, wear t-shirts, listen to music, and craft exceptionally bad poetry after every break-up.

The thing that makes “Control” special is something that I never thought Corbijn capable of: humanism. Rather than portraying Curtis as a tragic figure whose only purpose in life is to make us weep at the futility of existence, instead “Control” shows us the human side of Curtis. Sure, the famous stories are all there: Curtis calling Manchester music mogul Tony Wilson a “cunt” for not signing them faster than he eventually did; the band’s record deal etched in blood on a bar napkin; the unconventional recording sessions with seminal producer Martin Hannett; the epilepsy that plagued Curtis as Joy Division reached their zenith; and the sordid affair with Annik Honore that left Curtis’ marriage in tatters.

But what we ALSO get in “Control” is a teenaged Curtis glammed up and rocking to Bowie in his bedroom. A suit-wearing, caring Curtis holding down a crap social service job (where, years before he himself becomes afflicted, he witnesses a disabled girl in the throes of an epilepsy attack.) A young, (hrm — what is the word here? I want to type “optimistic” though I doubt you could EVER define Ian Curtis with that label — let’s go with:) confident Curtis canoodling with his young wife and moving into the flat he would later take his own life in.

The end result is a film that shreds the Curtis of our mythical bedroom posters and rock dreams — and replaces him with Ian, a heavy guy with heavy problems that life got the best of. He wasn’t an ever-creating and ever-brilliant artiste. He was just a great lyricist who lucked his way into a great band at an incredibly pivotal time in music history. But in the film’s humanization of Curtis, we end up with a hero you can actually IDENTIFY with, which makes his descent and downfall even MORE tragic and lump-in-the-throat-worthy. In crafting him as the anti-myth, Corbijn manages to make Ian Curtis all the more tragic and mythic in the end.

But the real character in “Control,” it turns out, isn’t the fated Curtis. No siree, the REAL lead in “Control” is Manchester, the city itself. I had always read about post-war Manchester being a pretty dire place, but in Corbijn’s vision, it might be the most dire place on Earth. When you’re making a movie about the industrial slumhole of the UK, you don’t need to use grainy, black-and-white film. Manchester IS grainy. It IS black-and-white (well, in this case, mostly the grey of abandon.) I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a single tree in the whole movie.

Instead, you see the refuse of the man’s “victory” over nature. Manchester, so much to answer for, indeed. In this city, all is grey. Hope seems like a laughable concept. Dismal row houses simply take up the space between snorting factories. Corbijn’s moving painting of the city seems a cross between an Ingmar Bergman movie and a Pink Floyd album cover. It is a beast of a city.

Which is what made Joy Division its perfect soundtrack. The music crafted by Bernie Sumner and Pete Hook, the words written by Ian Curtis, and the whole thing put together by the otherworldly hand of Martin Hannett… it all equalled ONE thing: BLEAK. Joy Division is the sound of bleakness. Manchester is the city of bleakness. It IS the perfect marriage of souls.

As Americans, and me being one living in the Midwest, we’re not supposed to “get” Joy Division. There’s no “Lost Souls” to be found when you’re driving through the cornfields. I don’t “feel it closing in, day in, day out” in the Taco Bell drive-thru. In the late 1970’s, Manchester was the action and Joy Division the reaction.

It’s interesting, though, the culture that flourishes from a city like this, and God has there been a lot of it. Morrissey and the Smiths sought change. The Stone Roses sought mysticism. The Happy Mondays and Oasis simply sought escapism. Yet Joy Division seem to be the only big-scale band to ever hold Manchester up to a mirror and sing about its cracks and holes and flaws in the city and flaws in life.

Which is exactly why this film works for Corbijn. There’s no uncomfortable setting to transport Joy Division to. They were already IN an uncomfortable setting to begin with, and “Control” lets it shine. Corbijn had the smarts to mirror the town with the band and allow all of us Europeanally-challenged masses to let out a collective “Ohhhhhh, NOW I get it.”

“Control” is, I hate to say it, a great film. It’s a history lesson, musical paradise, and an indie film lovers dream at once. Plus, at its soul, it’s a tragic love story, and that shit’s been selling out theatres since Romeo & Juliet. Just be ready — you WILL be listening to Joy Div for weeks on end after seeing it.