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A rising star in his early twenties, he was dead by 23, having killed himself on the eve of Joy Division’s first American tour, unable to cope with the pressures of his personal and professional life. He had, put bluntly, lost control, hence this film’s title.

Ian (Sam Riley) + Debbie (Samantha Morton)

But it's a misconception that Control is a film about music and Joy Division. It isn't. Director Anton Corbijn has delivered a study of how a relationship falls apart and how actions have consequences, where the silence and the space between those involved have much more power than the songs.

In fact, the film isn’t even really about Ian. Corbijn chose Curtis’ wife Deborah’s memoir, the exceptional Touching From A Distance, as his source material and as a result, Control is very much Deborah’s story, a tale of beautiful, tragic, desperate, gut-wrenching love.

On the down, it means that the peripheral players, those people in the world that Ian never really let Debbie see, are little more than caricatures – Hooky is oafishly unfeeling, Bernard is a nervous nerd and both Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson seem to be based on the portrayals of them in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People.

Only Annik Honore, Ian’s mistress, has any extra depth, thanks in no small part to the real Annik's involvement in the project, filling in the gaps that Debbie left in her original text.

Joy Division + Tony Wilson in Control

But you soon realise that that the peripheries are not important. They are simply there to move the plot on, to allow us to see the growing distance between man and wife.

Control is a remarkable film for two reasons. The first is that it manages to become more powerful the further away from it you get, as the extra layers and dimensions to the central relationship fall into place mentally.

The second is that that very fact means Corbijn has managed to do something utterly jaw-dropping; he has made a film with the same emotional impact as Joy Division’s music and there is simply no greater compliment to pay the film than that.