Anton Corbijn’s The American looks and feels like a movie made by a filmmaker who hasn’t been to the movies since the ’70s — and I mean that as the highest compliment. This is Corbijn’s second feature: His first was the elegiac and gorgeously shot (by Martin Ruhe) Control, based on the life story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the influential and much-loved Manchester band Joy Division, who committed suicide at age 23 in 1980. Before Corbijn was a filmmaker, or even a director of videos for the likes of U2 and Depeche Mode, he was a photographer specializing in rock ‘n’ roll types as subjects; he had photographed Curtis and the other members of Joy Division early in his career, having left his native Holland for England because, as he’s said in interviews, he wanted “to be where that music comes from.”
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