For Fans of Joy Division

Anton Corbijn shot Control in stark black and white not for nostalgia but because it matched the world Ian Curtis actually inhabited. Sam Riley's performance strips away martyrdom and leaves something more difficult: a 23-year-old with epilepsy, a failing marriage, and stage seizures he could not always tell apart from his art, making decisions that made no sense from the outside and perfect sense from inside the pain. The film refuses to explain Curtis, which is the right call. Most biopics spend their third act telling you what the subject meant. Control trusts you to feel it.

Where Control is intimate and grey, Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People is loose, funny, and fully aware of its own absurdity. Steve Coogan plays Tony Wilson as a man who understood that pop music was changing culture and kept bumbling into important decisions anyway. Joy Division appear briefly, their weight amplified by what we know is coming. The film is the best account of why Manchester mattered beyond its bands: the city produced a scene because a few people believed something could happen there before there was evidence it would.

Joy Division arrived soaked in the same European literary pessimism as Disco Elysium: Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, the sense that consciousness is a problem that living does not solve. The game's detective wakes inside a ruined body in a ruined city and must reconstruct a self from contradictory voices, with the full knowledge that any self he builds might be wrong. Curtis read obsessively in the same vein. If you love Joy Division's intellectual texture more than its surface gloom, Disco Elysium is the game built for you.

Deborah Curtis wrote her memoir of Ian Curtis with a directness that the music press rarely managed. She was his wife, not his fan club, and the book is quietly devastating because of it: here is the domestic life behind the stage seizures, the affairs, the epilepsy management, and the creative intensity that everyone outside called genius. It is not a comfortable read. It is the one primary-source document that does not turn Curtis into a symbol before you have had time to understand him as a person.