If Karl Marx was right, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. But in the case of the Manchester band Joy Division, the pendulum continues to swing between comedy and calamity, three decades after their brief but hugely influential career.

Released this week, a new documentary on the band attempts a definitive chronicle of this much-told musical saga while shedding new light on the enduring purity and power of their music. A high-brow collaboration between the director Grant Gee and the cultural critic Jon Savage, Joy Division is solemn and scholarly, but peppered with witty insights and black humour.

“This is the story of the band, why we did it, talking to the people involved,” explains Stephen Morris, the lanky, boyish, affable drummer for Joy Division and its successor, New Order.

Morris appears in the film alongside a gallery of peers and expert witnesses. The film-makers also pulled off several small coups in unearthing ultra-rare recordings and persuading Annik Honoré, once the lover of the band’s singer Ian Curtis, to break her long silence. “It also has some great archive footage,” Morris says. “It brought memories back, seeing Manchester like that.”

Indeed, one angle the documentary pursues is that Joy Division’s music was inseparable from the postindustrial wasteland of late 1970s Manchester. As the guitarist Bernard Sumner recalls: “You were always looking for beauty because it was such an ugly place.”

Gee’s documentary also credits the band with kickstarting Manchester’s recent evolution from slums and derelict warehouses to super-clubs and loft apartments. Urban regeneration is not that simple, of course, but Morris is half-convinced. “We got things going in a certain direction,” he says. “Not particularly Joy Division or New Order but doing the Haçienda club was a bit of a cultural statement about Manchester, and that became massive. Then we opened the wine bar, Dry. And then everybody else did it . . . and made money out of it! Ha ha!”

Joy Division could be seen as the final chapter in a loose cinematic trilogy about the band. But while Michael Winterbottom’s Factory Records postmortem 24 Hour Party People (2002) was a cheerfully absurd farce, and Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007) a kitchen-sink tragedy, Gee’s elegant documentary strikes a careful balance between the two extremes. Unlike its sister films, it also concentrates on the music rather than the personalities.

Winterbottom’s film, Morris says, was essentially Carry On Factory Records while Control tells “the story of one man’s inner turmoil”. But the drummer prefers to endorse the party line among the surviving Joy Division members: that they were essentially juvenile jokers saddled with an undeserved reputation for Mancunian gloom after Curtis committed suicide in 1980. After Curtis died, Joy Division regrouped as New Order. Morris recruited his girlfriend, Gillian Gilbert, to play keyboards and shape the band’s new electronic direction.

However, Gilbert did not return to New Order when they reformed after a long hiatus in the 1990s. Only with this reunion did the three Joy Division veterans seem ready to address their musical legacy. They began playing more Curtis compositions, and were even introduced at concerts under their original name.

Even 30 years later, the Joy Division story remains a volatile mix of tragedy and farce. The resurgence in the band’s profile has ironically coincided with a bitter falling-out between Sumner and the bass player Peter Hook. According to Hook, New Order have split for good. Sumner disagrees. Hook has threatened legal action if New Order continue without him. Morris is careful not to take sides. “Bernard and Peter have quite a complicated relationship,” he says. “To me it’s going back to the playground. It’s very Spinal Tap showbiz clichés, and Joy Division wasn’t showbusiness.”

The last time New Order dissolved in acrimony, in the early 1990s, Morris and Gilbert withdrew to their Macclesfield farmhouse to start a family. As it turned out, that was not goodbye, more like au revoir. “I’m not making that mistake again, because the next thing you know they’ll bloody want to make another record,” Morris laughs. “You can’t carry on for ever, it just gets undignified. But I love being in New Order, I love doing music. It’s very hard to retire.”

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