Yes, in many cases you can use the tone curve controls (Brightness, Contrast, Parametric Curve, Point Curve) as a substitute for the Blacks control -- particularly the latter two, since they give you more control over just that portion of the curve.
The main idea, though, is that Exposure & Blacks will let you first define the range of tones that you plan to work with for a given image. In other words, you set the highlight clip point and the black clip point. Then you can use the remaining tone tools (listed above) to massage the stuff in between those extremes. This gives you finer gradations when using those controls.
For example, suppose you had a very low contrast image and you wanted to map one of the gray-ish values to pure black. You could do that with the point curve, no problem. But then you would have somewhat less control (using, say, the remaining "right half" of the point curve UI) for finessing the rest of the image. A better approach in this case is to first use the Blacks slider to establish the black (even if somewhat conservatively). Then you have the full parametric/point curve UI to work with.
One approach I often use is to hold down Option/Alt when using Blacks, which gives a visualization of what gets clipped. I will adjust Blacks to just shy of stuff getting clipped (i.e., if stuff starts getting seriously clipped with Blacks = 8, I'll back off to Blacks = 7). Then I can use the parametric/point curve to finesse the shadows.
