No story about Joy Division - the most inappropriately-named band ever - should have a happy ending. Yet a new biopic of the band's singer, Ian Curtis, will please both old and new fans with its heady soundtrack and its touching portrayal of a young couple under pressure. The Dutch photographer turned film-maker Anton Corbijn tells Donald Clarkeabout the making of Control

Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders. Here are the young men, well where have they been?

From Decades by Joy Division

WHERE indeed? The men who, when young, wore enormous coats and filleted the lyrics of Joy Division for clues as to the Wretchedness of Everything have, long ago, cast off their thrift-store duds and taken jobs as quantity surveyors, bank managers and, well, film writers for The Irish Times.

Among its more significant virtues, the film Control - a hypnotic study of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division - offers those aging existentialists a rare return to that singular school of beautiful misery that thrived in the early days of Margaret Thatcher's first term. Shot in eerily precise monochrome around buildings composed of Teutonic right-angles, the film has less to do with Manchester as it really was than with a cool, modernist half-world knocked together by a brilliant gang of musicians, designers, photographers and promoters.

Joy Division wrote scary, monolithic pocket epics such as Atmosphere, She's Lost Control and Love Will Tear Us Apart. Martin Hannett, the age's most gifted producer, translated them into a distant, mechanical language. Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records, surrounded the music with clouds of fourth-form philosophy. Peter Saville put the records in covers so grimly beautiful you were reluctant to break the shrink-wrap.

And then there was Anton Corbijn. The Dutch photographer, now a trim 52, was never officially part of the Joy Division posse, but his photographs of the band - and one in particular - were crucial in defining their austere image.

Now, some 27 years after Curtis committed suicide, Corbijn has got round to directing Control. Based on Touching from a Distance, a sad book by Ian's widow, Deborah Curtis, the film is bewitching throughout, but one can't help but wonder what this sharply focused, glacial universe has to do with the grubby Manchester of the late 1970s.

"There's not that much of the city in the film, though, is there?" Corbijn says. "The film has an awful lot of interiors in it. Actually, it's mostly set in Macclesfield, where Ian was from, and this is how it was. But some people who want to find something to complain about have said that maybe Manchester looks too glossy."

It's not necessarily a complaint. Control is brilliant in the way it rediscovers how Joy Division were presented and perceived. That is, in itself, an achievement worth celebrating.

"I tried to isolate a lot of things about that time," he goes on. "What I remember from England was that it had a very bleak landscape. And Joy Division's entire history seemed to take place in black and white. I have never seen a shot of the group in colour. The album sleeves were in black and white and that was their world. So the film had to reflect that."

So Corbijn would concede that the film's look is as influenced by contemporaneous images of Joy Division as it is by the realities of the era? "Not so much the images themselves, but the collective memory of Joy Division. That is in black and white. I was trying to honour that collective memory."

It was Joy Division who first drew Anton Corbijn to England. Nearly three decades ago, enamoured by the harsh brilliance of Unknown Pleasures, the group's first LP, he made his way to London and began pestering them for a photo shoot. Eventually he persuaded the group to meet him at Lancaster Gate tube station and managed to conjure up an iconic image. The photograph finds three members of the band with their backs to the camera and their faces towards a looming tunnel. Only Curtis is turned to face the viewer. The picture has adorned many students' walls in the decades that followed.

"They were very noncommittal at first," Corbijn says. "It was 12 days after I arrived and I spoke almost no English. At first they wouldn't shake my hand. Then at the end they did shake my hand and I guess that was an acknowledgment that they liked what I had done. The picture showed them walking away to unknown pleasures and it is, I think, just about the only conceptual picture of them."

At first nobody expressed any interest in a photo of a rock band with their backs to the camera, but the dogged Corbijn eventually persuaded the New Musical Express of his worth and went on to became that paper's most important photographer. The briefest glance at a Corbijn snap of Josef K or Cabaret Voltaire or The Au Pairs - all, most likely, staring meaningfully towards the horizon - will cause many aging Young Men to weep grey, grey nostalgic tears. This was, arguably, the NME's greatest hour, the era of such significant pundits as Julie Burchill, Paul Morley and Ian Penman.

"I had no expectations at that time," Corbijn says. "I just enjoyed the music and wanted to be part of it all. This was the era of Echo and the Bunnymen and The Undertones and The Specials. England was exploding with great music. I just had perfect timing. There I was living in a squat - the NME didn't pay so well - and delighted with myself."

Continuing associations with developing rock behemoths such as U2 and Depeche Mode helped Corbijn escape the squat and make his way to the penthouse. In between sessions for the likes of Vogue and Rolling Stone, he began to branch out into music videos and more esoteric still photography. To this day, Corbijn still winces and sighs if you make the mistake of glibly referring to him as a rock photographer. Indeed, he makes the same face if you dare to call Control a rock film.

"No, I would not say it's a rock film. It is not a biopic on Joy Division. It is about Ian Curtis and he became the singer of Joy Division, and therefore they are in it - which is fine. But it is about how Ian drifted from Deborah and became more and more isolated."

It is accurate to say that the deteriorating relationship between Debbie and Ian, who married young and had a daughter just as the band were finding their rhythm, forms the emotional core of Control. Sam Riley, a virtual unknown, and Samantha Morton, an experienced sourpuss, deliver painfully touching performances as the despairing couple.

Joy Division enthusiasts will not, however, feel themselves short-changed by the music. The raw concert sequences, performed by the actors themselves, conjure up all the aggressive urgency that Joy Division brought to the stage. Riley, in particular, brings eerie substance to Curtis's weird, fidgety dance (inspired, many say, by the singer's epilepsy) that he used to perform during the band's numbers.

"I met Sam in December," Corbijn says. "I met Joy Division first in November. It was the cold time of the year. The band, like all those northern guys, were just wearing a shirt and a coat. They didn't have enough to eat and they were smoking too much. Sam was exactly the same. I really saw that. He was someone you could believe in. But then I had this film with a total unknown, in black and white and with this sad story. Nobody wanted to give me any money. But, ultimately, all those odd elements are what people like about the film."

Corbijn was eventually forced to finance the shooting of the film out of his own pocket. The knowledge that the director had staked so much helped inspire the cast to new levels of dedication, but the fear remained that the public would be baffled by this singular entity. After all, the story of Joy Division had already been told in the opening half of Michael Winterbottom's fine 24-Hour Party People. Who wanted to see all that misery again?

"It was very tough," he agrees. "It was only just after shooting that we got a deal to finish the film. But I was still the biggest financier. You become the film. You begin to sweat it out of your skin. I couldn't believe I had a team like that on my first film, but we were working in a vacuum. We had no idea what people would make of it."

A triumphant screening at this year's Cannes Film Festival put the film-makers' minds at rest. "I had cut it down from three hours to two hours and was still very unsure how it would go. Then, at Cannes, we suddenly realised people liked it. They suddenly got it. We were all in tears. It was astonishing."

Who would have thought that any story concerning Joy Division could have such a happy ending?

Anton's icons: Bono, Beefheart etc

Anton Corbijn is - as the sainted Annie Leibovitz noted - the most influential rock photographer of the past quarter-century. Travelling to London from his native Netherlands in 1979, he quickly established a reputation for creating moodily impressive images of serious-minded musicians positioned beside gaunt trees, dilapidated buildings and yawning warehouses.

"Where I come from, we look more for the spirit of a photograph," Corbijn says. "I think there is a cultural difference with Britain. This country has much more of a literary tradition. It is less visual. There are many great writers from England, but fewer photographers or painters."

Early, striking pictures of Captain Beefheart, Echo and the Bunnymen and, of course, Joy Division helped establish Corbijn at the NME and brought him to the attention of longtime patrons U2.

"I took the first assignment with U2 because I wanted to go to New Orleans. I reckoned I would watch a few songs and then take off. Then I realised they were playing on a boat, so I was trapped. I had to watch the whole gig."

In subsequent years, Corbijn went on to direct videos for The Art of Noise, Nick Cave and, most conspicuously, his old chums Depeche Mode. He has also developed a healthy career away from the world of rock and, in 1999, published an admired collection called 33 Still Lives.

But, for all Corbijn's varied achievements, his images of U2 will, for good or ill, probably remain the most ubiquitous of his works.

"U2 are a band that likes having meetings," he laughs. "Which I do not like very much. But it is a collaborative process. The image of The Joshua Tree came from my memory of a photograph I had taken of Captain Beefheart. There was one of those things in the background. Bono had been reading the Bible and liked the idea. To that point, the album was going to be called Desert Song or The Two Americas. My relationship with U2 is quite beautiful and quite unique."

Despite his suspicions about the British and their lack of a visual culture, Anton Corbijn still lives contentedly in North London. Control is his first feature.