Review: Steve Jobs

"I'm poorly made," Steve Jobs confesses. Not so this biopic, which stands as a supreme achievement that finds director Danny Boyle beautifully marrying his visual flourish to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's verbal razzle dazzle, and a troupe of actors all at the top of their game.

Based on Walter Isaacson's best-selling 2011 biography, the film is structured in three acts, with each act covering the run-up to a product launch in relative real time. Each act or movement features the same set of recurring characters and motifs - one can see the notes, specific chords that would run through a symphony, and how these notes are re-arranged to convey the growth or dissolution of the relationships between Jobs and several of the key people in his personal and professional lives. Sorkin's design is deliberately visible - this is a film that embraces its artifice and theatricality and, in its breakneck pace and rhythmic fluidity, plays more like a screwball comedy or backstage musical than a conventional biopic.

Act One finds Jobs at the De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California, as he is about to unveil the first-ever Macintosh. Expectations are high - the Ridley Scott-directed commercial "1984," which posited Apple as the world's great hope in breaking IBM's stranglehold and bringing computers to the masses, had aired during the Super Bowl and generated tremendous buzz for the product. Jobs has a vision, not just for his creation but also for himself, and he expects all those around him to bend to his will. When beleaguered system-software developer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) informs him the voice demo contains a system error, Jobs insists he fix it as he believes it crucial that the world hear the computer say "Hello." When Hertzfeld protests, Jobs reminds him he had three weeks to make it work, more than enough time - after all, God was able to create the world in six days. "Someday you'll have to tell us how you did it," Andy quips, but he ultimately comes up with a workaround after Jobs blithely threatens to credit every person responsible for every element and expose Hertzfeld as the sole weak link. When marketing and communications Andy Cunningham (Sarah Snook) tells Jobs that the fire department advises against turning off the Exit signs for the presentation, Jobs replies, "If a fire causes a stampede to the unmarked exits, it will have been well worth it for those who survive."

Jobs' overwhelming hubris and intractability are at their most heartless during his interactions with Steve "Woz" Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Apple's co-founder and the tech savant responsible for most of the company's breakthroughs, and Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), who rages at Jobs for letting her, the mother of his child Lisa (played at age 5 by Makenzie Moss, at age 9 by Ripley Sobo, and at 19 by Perla Haney-Jardine), live on welfare whilst his company stock is worth 441 million dollars. Jobs refuses Woz's repeated requests to acknowledge the team behind the Apple II, the product that has been a source of consistent profitability; Jobs wants to look forward to the future, not back upon the past, but the genuine reason for not granting this small but significant gesture may lie in the fact that Woz and his team designed the Apple II without Jobs' favoured "end-to-end control."

Lisa, however, is a more difficult fact to deny. Through most of the film, Jobs sidesteps the truth of her paternity though it is all too clear that Lisa has inherited his intelligence and ability to think ten steps ahead of everyone else. Only she and Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Job's key marketing executive, gain any traction with him. Hoffman, aside from being his invaluable employee, trusted confidante and de facto shrink, serves as his moral compass, urging him to be a better father to Lisa and to essentially follow Woz's philosophy: "You can be decent and gifted at the same time."

Indeed, if nothing else, the film effectively depicts the difficulties of dealing with a man whose brilliance was matched by his monstrosity. This is a man who demands control of his own destiny even when he appears to be on the losing side as in Act Two, where the now-ousted Jobs has founded his new company NeXT and is about to introduce the "Cube," an impractically priced but exquisitely designed computer model that has yet to possess an operating system. That maniacal unwillingness to cede control results in his lashing out at those he perceives as enemies, whether it be Time magazine for not putting him on the cover, his biological parents for rejecting him, Woz for chafing against being the Ringo Starr to his John Lennon, Chrisann for guilting him into financial and emotional support, or John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the Apple CEO who was one of Job's greatest supporters before allegedly blindsiding him with a boardroom takeover.

Sorkin has taken obvious liberties, even poking fun at his set-up of having the characters take Jobs to task for his multitude of personal and professional sins mere moments before every presentation, but the daring works. The fictionalisation of the facts to suit the structure is diagrammatic yet tells one everything we need to know about his life, his work, and his relationships. The compressing of time ensures narrative propulsion. The recognisable prosody of Sorkin's dialogue is particularly synaptic - the verbal exchanges pulsate with ferocious electricity. Boyle, meanwhile, gives each act its individual look and feel - greens and greys and 16mm for the first act, reds and golds and 35mm for the second act, and Kubrickian earth tones and high-definition for the final act. His dynamic direction enhances the vibrancy and immediacy of Sorkin's script, and imbues a sophistication to the swirl of chaos that is conducted with military precision. This is the rare film that can be taken apart and have its individual components analysed and not found lacking.

The cast is exemplary. Michael Fassbender as Jobs is simply superlative. Ashton Kutcher may have had a better resemblance to the real-life Jobs in the mediocre 2013 Jobs, but Fassbender easily overcomes the hurdle with a transformative and immersive portrayal. In fact, so deep does he burrow under Jobs' skin that one has to remind oneself that it is Fassbender onscreen. The actor not only handles Sorkin's dialogue with ease and dexterity, but he skillfully embodies Jobs' force of personality, unswerving confidence, demonic energy, and Machiavellian manipulation with pitch-perfect calibration.

Steve Jobs

Directed by: Danny Boyle

Written by: Aaron Sorkin; based on Walter Isaacson's biography

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Sarah Snook, Mackenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, Perla Haney-Jardine, John Ortiz