Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs presents a distinctly theatrical take on the biopic. It arrives on the heels of 2014, arguably the best year ever for this usually facile genre. The screenplay comes from the seemingly inexhaustible playwright/TV-show-runner/screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network). Sorkin loves to set his stories “backstage” and behind the scenes of institutions we all think we know well, as with his TV shows Sports Night, The West Wing, and The Newsroom, and Steve Jobs is no exception. In telling the life story of the Apple co-founder, Sorkin drastically limits his timeline and divides the movie into three acts, each set in the lead-up to one of the many product launches Jobs presided over during the course of his professional life. It’s a clever tactic, partly because these events—where Jobs, standing on an almost bare stage in his signature black mock-turtleneck, unveiled new computers or other tech gadgets—was how most of us saw the man until his death. More importantly, the enforced limitation of the structure astutely avoids the typical highlights-from-cradle-to-grave shallowness of the biopic genre. The obvious narrative conceit also enables the filmmakers to take greater artistic license with the facts than audiences normally accept from biographical features. I don’t mean to imply that Steve Jobs isn’t factual—Sorkin researched his script thoroughly and partially based it on Walter Isaacson’s authorized, warts-and-all biography of the same title—but the movie effectively utilizes dramatic conventions of time compression, composite characters, and even a few illustrative flashbacks. The result is a marvelously entertaining picture, with high caliber actors spouting the dense, rapid-fire dialogue that we expect from this writer.

Even Danny Boyle, the absurdly overrated director behind Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Slumdog Millionaire, can’t mess up this script. I make no secret of my dislike for the filmmaker responsible for such unwatchable drek as Shallow Grave, The Beach, and Millions, but even I will admit that Steve Jobs is not just a well written picture, it’s expertly directed too—making it easily Boyle’s best work to date. Michael Fassbender, the greatest actor of his generation, brings complexity and a fascinatingly calm passion to the title character. Seth Rogen makes Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak amiable and substantive, and Michael Stuhlbarg shines as Andy Hertzfeld, an original member of the Macintosh team. But the real star here is Kate Winslet playing Apple marketing executive Joanna Hoffman. Though a relatively minor figure in Job’s real life, she won the satirical award given annually at Apple to "the person who did the best job of standing up to Jobs” two years in a row. Sorkin takes that historical footnote and turns Hoffman into a combination of Effie Perine, Walter Brennan, and Jimminy Cricket. And Winslet embodies the character with credibility, wit, and grace.

A common drawback to most biographical features concerning uber-famous people is that, by the time the movie comes out, they don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.  But Steve Jobs avoids this pitfall too, by focusing on encounters with Jobs’ former boss, Apple CEO John Sculley (played winningly by Jeff Daniels) and Jobs’ daughter Lisa (played by Makenzie Moss at age five, Ripley Sobo at age nine, and Perla Haney-Jardine at age nineteen). These two real-life individuals were tightlipped about Jobs and did not contribute to the scores of preceding print, TV, documentary, and feature film accounts of his life. Since Sorkin was the first writer they opened up to, their presence in this cinematic portrayal gives it a fresh and distinctive take.   Thus the three launches depicted in the picture aren’t for the three most significant products in Job’s career—but rather what he happened to release during three key stages in his life. The high-tech devices are “McGuffins,” which help to place Jobs into a pseudo-Shakespearian narrative—in Act One he’s a young king, in Act Two he’s a former king in exile, and in Act Three he’s a king returning to the thrown. His complex relationships with the mentor he never wanted and the child he refused to accept frame the story far more than the gizmos. 

Of course, Steve Jobs is still a biopic, and Sorkin’s structure can’t completely free it from many of the genre’s simplistic hallmarks. Everything about the protagonist: what drives him, his need for power and control, his public and private behavior, the way he deals with co-workers, etc., is all  "explained" by his family history and wrapped up in a fairly standard redemption-arc. But this is still one of the most impressive approaches to a film of this sort I’ve seen yet.