Film: Steve Jobs

By Tom Browne

Although there’s much to admire, this clever-clever biopic of Apple’s co-founder is missing its core.

The poster for Steve Jobs carries the credit: “From director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.” And this is only fair. Just as Sorkin’s Oscar-winning screenplay for The Social Network lent a street-smart fizz to David Fincher’s stylised direction (instead of trimming the lengthy dialogue, Fincher famously instructed his actors to speak more quickly), so it provides a much-needed anchor point for Boyle’s rather more chilly biopic. 

It says something about the entertainment industry’s obsession with Apple Inc that we’ve now had two films about the company’s co-founder. But while 2013’s Jobs had a sentimentalised and Tippex-friendly approach to the source material—as exemplified by Ashton Kutcher’s aww-shucks central performance—this offering dispenses with the soft soap from the off. In a bravura opening sequence, we see Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) spitting venom at his colleagues as his nascent company prepares for the 1984 Macintosh launch. When told that his shiny new computer isn’t ready to say hello to the expectant audience, he shouts, “You had three weeks! The universe was created in a third of that time!”, inviting the pitch-perfect response, “Well, someday you’ll have to tell us how you did it.”

But while the character’s Messiah complex does much to alienate his co-workers, it performs a similar trick with the audience. At times, you’re reminded of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street: why on earth should such a preening bully command any sympathy, loyalty or attention? Fassbender is a natural screen presence and eminently watchable, but he fails to capture the essence of his character here. By the time the credits rolled, you don’t understand Steve Jobs any more than you did at the start. And frankly, you don’t want to.

By far the best performance—and the one that restores some soul to the film—is from Kate Winslet as Apple’s harassed marketing executive Joanna Hoffman. Her outrage at Jobs’ treatment of his daughter Lisa (first denying his parentage, then threatening to withhold her college tuition) is palpable, and there’s an affecting scene late on when she threatens to resign unless her boss makes amends. There’s also a moving portrayal of Apple’s constantly derided co-founder Steve Wozniak by Seth Rogan, proving that the further away he gets from Judd Apatow-style bromances, the better he looks.

Sadly, there’s isn’t the same level of emotional engagement in Steve Jobs’ confrontations with Apple’s CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), or the famous moment when the board members vote to oust Jobs from the company, since you’re amazed they put up with the disrespectful bore for so long in the first place. Unless you’re fascinated by the history of Apple products (tellingly, the film is structured around three key launches), you’re likely to feel stranded amid the hardware and corporate politics.

It should be said that Boyle ushers the narrative along with great efficiency, a quality entirely missing from the incoherent Trance, his previous directorial outing. But for all its smart riffs and clever construction, this is ultimately a film—rather like Jobs himself—that’s more at home with technology than people.

Published on Moviemail, November 2015.