Riley in Control

“No language, just sound, that’s all we need know, to synchronize / Love to the beat of the show,” croons delicate Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis in “Transmission.” Love to the beat of the show: That ardor and rhythm thrum in two of this fall’s best movies, which, coincidentally, both happen to be biopics about rock legends. Anton Corbijn, best known for his photographs and music videos for U2, Depeche Mode and Metallica, makes his feature-film debut with Control (Oct 10). This haunting, spare chronicle of Curtis’s short life—he committed suicide at 23—follows the Macclesfield youth (played by Sam Riley, in his first lead film role) through his volatile marriage to local girl Deborah Woodruff (Samantha Morton), his day job in an unemployment office, his epileptic fits—and his mesmerizing performances.

“The reason I made this film is that it’s very connected to the influence Joy Division had on me as a young man—enough to move countries [from the Netherlands to England] in 1979,” Corbijn, 52, says. “It’s very hard for people to imagine that now, that music can do that to you.” Yet the director, who photographed Joy Division two weeks after arriving in the U.K., insists that Control is not a “rock movie”: “It’s a story about this boy who chases his dreams and is disappointed in the end by where he ends up. I wanted to humanize his story, not make more mythology.”

Haynes and Charlotte Gainsbourg on the set of I’m Not There

Todd Haynes specializes in exploring music myths, a fact known by anyone who’s seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), told with Barbie dolls, and Velvet Goldmine (1998), a bang-a-gong love letter to glam rock. His latest, I’m Not There (Nov 21), takes on Bob Dylan by breaking him into six different characters, played by Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Christian Bale, among others. “I felt that splitting Dylan up into several different selves was the best and most accurate way of really getting to something at his core,” Haynes, 46, explains. Blanchett, for instance, incarnates the Dylan who went electric in the mid-’60s; Bale plays both the earnest folkie of the early ’60s and the Christian convert of the ’70s. “[This constant changing] was a survival mechanism for dealing with the huge amount of attention that he generated with every step he took,” Haynes adds. Dylan gave the director his blessing to do the project—the first time the legend’s music and life rights were granted for a dramatic movie. “This film certainly opens him up, and I think he probably dug that,” Haynes conjectures. “I hope the humor and the playfulness of the film, and the diversity of the approach, will amuse him.”