Joy Division by Paul Bullock

It's so often the case that the film which gets released second in a brace of movies about the same subject pales in comparison to the first. Joy Division is no different. Treading the same ground (albeit in a different way) as last year’s Control, Grant Gee’s documentary - of course - takes a look at the life, turbulent times and long-lasting legacy of the eponymous Mancunian post-punk band. But despite its great sensitivity, incredibly thorough research (there is some fantastic performance footage dredged up from the archives) and intelligent assembly, Joy Division still has something missing…

The big difference between this and Control is in the storytelling, though that‘s not necessarily for the better. Nearly thirty years on from Curtis’s death, Joy Division’s short career has been analysed and dissected so often that it’s become a cliché, and it desperately needed Control's unorthodox kitchen sink melodrama approach to make the band seem fresh and interesting and their lead singer more than just another doomed rock icon. Putting all the emphasis back on the music and utilising a strict biopic structure, Joy Division feels like nothing more than a prosaic footnote in comparison and can do little more than have the usual suspects regurgitate the typical anecdotes.

The likes of Paul Morley, Alan Hempsall and, naturally, the late Tony Wilson are brought in to tell stories of epilepsy, visionary producers and gig riots, and to add some cohesion writer Jon Savage attempts to analyse them to get to the bottom of the most pressing questions. Who was the biggest influence on their sound: the band itself or producer Martin Hannett? What role did Manchester play in their inspiration? And how did they help regenerate the city in turn? Savage is too good a writer to provide pat answers, but the responses are still not particularly satisfying, rarely revealing things that haven’t been speculated on many times before in better productions.

Directing his second documentary about a generation-defining band (the first being his superior 1998 Radiohead film Meeting People Is Easy), Gee battles valiantly to make the flailing narrative visually exciting, but falls into the same traps as Savage. Influenced by the iconic visuals of the time, Gee has channelled the photography of Anton Corbijn and design of Peter Saville to create a film which is certainly authentic, but also second-hand. The lingering close-ups of bleak industrial skies and grim Mancunian skyscapes are the stuff of a thousand other Joy Division, Tony Wilson and Factory Records documentaries and do little to convince you that this deserves to be in your local Odeon rather than BBC4.

What Joy Division does have over other films however is a wealth of first-hand interviews. The surviving members of the band take centre stage, and their accounts lend the film some of Control‘s humanity. Old men now, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris talk hauntingly about their lives in the band while ghostly black and white images of their youth flash up on screen. Hook seems particularly affected as he explains how he heard about Curtis’s death while eating his Sunday dinner. Joy Division’s makers clearly understand that it’s these kinds of flourishes of tragic normality that define the band they document. It‘s just a shame that they only rarely illuminate them for the audience.