The photographer Anton Corbijn’s debut film, Control, about the miserable life of Ian Curtis, is a brilliant snapshot of a doomed talent. The lead singer of Joy Division died at the age of 23 by hanging himself off a clotheshorse nailed to his kitchen ceiling. The reasons for his suicide still haunt the friends and family he left behind.

Sam Riley plays the punk rock poet with the passion of a council-house Hamlet. Curtis grew up on a bleak estate and was intimate with prejudice and poverty. But it’s the fresh smell of black-and-white nostalgia that makes this film such a pleasure.

The camerawork is astonishing. The years really do roll back. The details are as sharp as the politics. Teenage tedium is measured out in cigarettes and scratchy David Bowie albums. Embarrassing thrashes with shabby garage bands are excuses to drink in pubs. A Sex Pistols gig is a seminal moment. All sorts of things unexpectedly gel in Ian Curtis’s life – mostly the unflappable girl-next-door Deborah (Samantha Morton) to whom Curtis proposes after his first paid gig.

But he still has to work as a humble stiff in the local dole office in Macclesfield. He spends months failing to shoehorn desperate people into nonexistent jobs. He’s heartbroken when they come back in pieces. Music is anger management until Joy Division kicks off. The lift is magical. The tracking shots are minor miracles. Corbijn’s concert footage of Riley fronting the original Joy Division anthems is absolutely electric. The actor leans into the microphone as if his life depended on it. His shirts are soaked with sweat. His robotic dances are mesmerising. His frightening epileptic fits make you feel shocked and helpless.

A scatty affair with a sophisticated Belgium journalist, Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara), looks like an exotic mistake. How does Curtis explain away this other self to Morton’s mortifyingly loyal Deborah? Riley charms you with his big brown eyes and mysterious tears. But the sheer intensity of his performance is frightening. So is the depression. “Cheer up,” says his rude and hairy road manager, a sublime comic turn by Toby Kebble. “You’re not the lead singer of the Fall.”

15, 119mins

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