A hyper-charismatic performance from Michael Fassbender combines with whip-cracking dialogue from Aaron Sorkin in Steve Jobs. Fassbender plays the founder of the Apple empire, but the film forgoes the sweeping grandeur of a biopic and instead confines itself to backstage at three product launches, making a curious, if compelling, three-act play.
Tension builds as the clock ticks down in real time before each launch, with the adamantine Jobs making impossible last-minute demands on his craven entourage. In the first scene in 1984, his main preoccupation is making the Macintosh computer say “Hello!” to the packed auditorium, as Jobs himself says “F**k you!” to his staff and the Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak, played by Seth Rogen.
While you give thanks that his genius has provided the very MacBook Air on which you write, Jobs is almost unpalatable here, even as incarnated by Fassbender — one of the few men who can look good in high-waisted jeans, rollnecks and rimless glasses. “If you keep on alienating people for no reason, there’ll be no one left to say ‘Hello!’ to,” says Joanna Hoffmann (Kate Winslet), an executive who drily describes herself as Jobs’s “work wife” and curbs his more inhuman excesses.
Humanity arrives in the form of Jobs’s daughter, Lisa (Mackenzie Moss), who turns up first, aged five, in the frenzied farce before the launch, accompanied by her hippy-dippy mother Chrisann (Katherine Waterston).
Chrisann wants to know how it feels for Jobs to be worth $441 million while his child is on welfare. Despite a paternity ruling, Jobs still clings to some algorithm which may prove that he is not the father, and callously rejects his daughter — until he recognises himself in her as she makes an abstract painting on the Mac screen.
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In this drama, slickly directed by Danny Boyle, much is made of Jobs’s emotional insecurity about his own adoption as a child, the Rosebud moment in his Citizen Kane trajectory. What is also fascinating here is how Jobs’s instincts made computers more human friendly: the floppy disc port on the Macintosh looks like a grin, and Jobs’ insistence on rounded corners on his rectangles are pleasantly evident on the iPhone in your pocket today.
What’s slightly disappointing is that the film only covers the early years: the 1988 launch of the NeXT black cube computer, when Jobs was temporarily estranged from Apple, and then of the iMac in 1998. The big iPod, iPad and iPhone thrills came later.
Still, the technocrat’s towering ego is brilliantly displayed by Sorkin, who does geek-speak and walky-talky dialogue as sharply as he did in The Social Network and The West Wing.
In the end, however, since we know so much more about Jobs from other sources — Walter Isaacson’s biography; Alex Gibney’s documentary — this movie is dwarfed by the size of its subject, and perhaps the leading man’s own “I think different, therefore I am” assessment of his virtuoso intellect.