Starring Sam Riley and Samantha Morton. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, October 26, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Some bands inspire more passion than they themselves exhibit. This is especially so when the band's history is a kind of passion play, with the act's central figure a kind of martyr to, well, something.

Joy Division helped to jump-start the Manchester scene of the late 1970s, even if the group's music was more gloomy than exciting. Of course, gloom is a form of excitement for teenagers lost in the reverie of darkened corners, and this is where we first meet Ian Curtis–memorably played by newcomer Sam Riley–a few years before he is to become lead singer of the band that started as Warsaw, became Joy Division, and, after the singer's sudden demise, New Order.

As presented by director Anton Corbijn, the photographer responsible for so much of the moody, black-and-white look of U2 and other post-'70s bands, Curtis was not a good candidate for stardom. He was a depressive, introverted character, with nascent epilepsy and insecurities that manifested in a troubled early marriage to Deborah Curtis, on whose memoir this thoughtful study was based (by screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh). Here, she's played by Samantha Morton, who helps to anchor proceedings.

The movie doesn't spend much time on Joy Division's origins; the band members are relatively undifferentiated (except for guitarist Bernard Sumner's chronic preconcert anxieties), and there's no sense of how their songs were created. But the scene itself is marvellously re-created in multitoned black-and-white.

There are plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscente, as when someone remarks that Curtis's condition could only be worse if he were the lead singer of the Fall–when, in fact, chisel-jawed Riley played goofy-looking Mark E. Smith in 24 Hour Party People, the previous movie to tackle this peculiar Zeitgeist.

It's a dour tale, leavened at times by humour courtesy of the band's foul-mouthed manager (the hilarious Toby Kebbell) and by romance supplied by Downfall's Alexandra Maria Lara, as a soft-spoken Belgian journalist better suited to Curtis than was the partner he, unfortunately for everyone, kept hanging onto. Corbijn sometimes leans toward the obvious, such as playing the band's signature song, "Love Will Tear Us Apart", when Curtis first cheats on his wife. Control, however, is subtle enough to make you think carefully about music, youth, and how you got to wherever you are.