Jon Savage's documentary Joy Division is a must-see

Two full days after seeing Joy Division, the documentary, it's difficult to shake off the feeling that this story is ongoing, in all of us. Photograph: Rex Features

As Peter Hook puts it, "You wait 30 years and two come along at once." He's talking about films about Manchester's finest, Joy Division. Hot on the heels of Anton Corbijn's masterful Control, comes Joy Division, the documentary, written by author and original Joy Division fan/friend Jon Savage, a factual account of events of almost three decades ago. But with so much about Joy Division now in the public domain, what can a 90-minute documentary have to offer that Control - or Ian Curtis's widow Deborah's book-exposé Touching From a Distance, with which Savage was involved - possibly have to offer?

Well, at the documentary's first British screening, at Sheffield's Showroom cinema, it offers a panel including Savage, various producers, director Grant Gee (who did the Radiohead film, Meeting People is Easy) and JD bassist Peter Hook. Although unintentional, it quickly becomes apparent that Hook and Savage make an unlikely comic duo. Savage professes himself so delighted with the documentary that watching it makes him "feel like dancing". Hook chortles: "That would have been a sight." More typically/seriously, Savage compares Joy Division to "distilled emotion" and speaks movingly of how scripting the film - featuring deceased friends Ian Curtis, Rob Gretton, Martin Hannett and Tony Wilson - had been very emotional for him. Hooky suggests that the docu-makers had a special insight because of the timing - the band members' contributions were filmed before they were exhausted from assisting with Control. He describes the documentary as "the perfect answer to Control". During questions from the floor, Hook reveals that the suicide note quoted in Control ("No need to fight now") is genuine but that it's actually the one from Ian Curtis's first - failed - suicide attempt. Deborah has never even shown the second one to the band, which Hook confesses he finds "awfully tantalising".

The film rolls.

Unlike Control, it has been shot in colour, as is most of the used archive footage from the times, but the opening sequence wonderfully captures the environment in which Joy Division were born: crumbling high-rise flats, constant demolition, open sewers, the overpowering sense of greyness, from the skies to the endless crumbling shopfronts. You can almost literally taste the grime. There's a telling comment from, ironically, Anton Corbijn where he mentions arriving in the late 1970s north-west as a well-fed Dutchman and being shocked at the poverty, and being around young men who were barely fed, were thinly clothed in cold weather and existed on a diet of smoking and drinking.

As the reformed old Sex Pistols hit Britain again, it's great to see some wonderful archive footage of their first Manchester gig in 1976. The Pistols may be a part of rock history now and that gig inspired everyone from Peter Hook to Mick Hucknall to form a band, but the footage suggests that few could have ever imagined it at the time. "Your band is a load of fucking bollocks," shouts one of many hecklers. This is a pre-punk world. Journalist and broadcaster Paul Morley may be the epitome of style now, but back then is clearly shown sporting a very lovely mullet.

Although Morley's coiffure provokes a chortle, Savage and pals' real scoop is gaining access to unseen Joy Division footage, especially Malcolm Whitehead's almost mythical short film. If you think the live scenes in Control are amazing - and they are - the sight and sound of a previously unseen Joy Division themselves playing on a full-size cinema screen is simply jaw dropping, particularly Curtis's mesmeric, man-possessed dancing and Steve Morris's hyperactive drums. Watching, I'm taken back to my own life-changing experience watching them, as a schoolboy, at Futurama in 1979. Terry Mason - one of the band's mates back in the day - is memorably filmed struggling to articulate how it felt to suddenly watch his mates from the pub turn into something else before his very eyes. "Astonishing," he splutters.

Gradually, the documentary tells the story of Curtis's final months through the eyes of the people that were there, including a tearful Annik Honore, Ian Curtis's "mistress", who emerges as rather different to the predatory female depicted in Control, and as a sensitive and grieving human being. There is a lot of humour - from Steve Morris we learn, for example, that the great poet Ian Curtis was fond of riding pigs in Macclesfield for entertainment - but Throbbing Gristle's Genesis P Orridge, a friend of Curtis, drops his agent provocateur image to be surprisingly emotional and insightful.

Another amazing coup is the broadcast of a tape of a 1980 Ian Curtis under hypnosis as talking to Bernard Sumner, shortly before he died. But it's difficult to watch the pain registering on the guitarist's face as he talks about the guilt that nobody knew enough or did enough for the singer, or hear Peter Hook agonising and confessing that his biggest regret is not visiting Ian Curtis in the chapel of rest, to say a last goodbye.

This is a very powerful and moving film that perhaps goes deeper than Control in exploring the full reasons for Curtis's suicide - much more is made of the effects of the medication he was on for epilepsy, and resulting mental state, than Control's simpler, more cinema-friendly emphasis on a difficult love triangle. That's not to say it's better than Control. There are one or two bits of sluggish editing and a tiny mistake (it's not the case that New Order "didn't play a Joy Division song for 18 years" - they were occasionally performing Love Will Tear Us Apart as early as 1984.) But it's different. There are no actors or recreations. There are no twists for dramatic effect. It's all vividly real. After I saw the monochrome world of Control, I remember feeling like I'd been punched in the stomach - it is that powerful - and then feeling really strange stepping out of the cinema into the colourful, shiny modern world, relentlessly progressing without so many of the people in this story that helped shaped it. But two full days after seeing Joy Division, the documentary, it's difficult to shake off the impact of some of the interviews, or the feeling that this story is ongoing, in all of us, in the lives of people left behind, many of whom are only starting to understand what happened with the benefit of age and experience.

"The thing is, it was all very easy," says Peter Hook, candidly towards the end, speaking about what it felt like being at the centre of the JD vortex. "It only got difficult after he died."

The documentary or Control? Which is it to be? There really isn't a choice. If you see one, you have to see them both.