Talking Movies: ‘Steve Jobs’ contends with the difficult man behind the machines

Before Steve Jobs started, we were warned, as per usual, to turn off our phones. The phone most people needed to turn off? The iPhone. A small thing maybe, but a thing worth noting. We are living in a world Steve Jobs helped to orchestrate.

Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin, Steve Jobs stars Michael Fassbender as the titular media mogul, Kate Winslet as his second-in-command, Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Jeff Daniels as onetime Apple CEO John Sculley. The movie eschews the more traditional narratives of previous Jobs biopics Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) and Jobs (2013) in favor of a three-set piece structure that takes us backstage for successive product launches — the first Macintosh in 1984, the first NeXT computer in 1988 and the first iMac in 1998. It is self-consciously stagey. As such, it is easy to imagine it as a play with different actors in the lead roles, which makes the fact that Fassbender doesn’t really look like Jobs seem somewhat trivial. Besides: Fassbender manages to capture certain Jobsian mannerisms well, especially Jobs’ oft-remarked upon ability to go from impassive to endearing in the blink of an eye.

Despite its atypical structure, Steve Jobs still manages to cram in a lot of the little iconic details you’d expect from a more traditional biopic: Shots of Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the garage, Apple’s famous 1984 ad, the well-known photo of Jobs at home under a Tiffany lamp, Apple’s “Think Different” campaign and so on. Sorkin’s ingenious, non-traditional structure, however, allows the film to neatly tell not one life story but five different, nested paternity stories — that of three products being launched; of Jobs’ daughter, Lisa; of Apple as a company; of Jobs himself; and, of course, the story of the birth of the world in which we all now live.

Given that this is the third fictional film about Jobs since 1999 and the second film about Steve Jobs to come out this year (if you count Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine), one might reasonably wonder why or if we need another movie about Steve Jobs. After Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher bombed in 2013, Boyle and Sorkin’s project raises the question: Who is this movie for? It’s probably not for truth fetishists, or for anyone who expects biopics to maintain a certain fidelity to the historical record. Even if you don’t know anything about the man, Steve Jobs largely feels contrived. There’s no way all these people had all these conversations and aired all their grievances exclusively at product launches, backstage. (To the film’s credit, Fassbender makes a quip to that effect at one point in the film.) Bottom line: If historical accuracy is your thing, or you’re looking for a more straightforward story about Jobs’ life, this may not be the movie for you.

It’s probably not for truth fetishists, or for anyone who expects biopics to maintain a certain fidelity to the historical record.

This movie likely holds the most appeal for Steve Jobs obsessives and people who, by virtue of living in a culture that valorizes celebrities, CEOs and technology, feel a kind of obligation as dutiful citizens and/or Apple users to learn a little something about the man. And let’s be honest, watching Michael Fassbender for 2 hours is easier than picking up a biography like Walter Isaacson’s 600 plus-page Steve Jobs (upon which this movie is loosely based), or the more-recent, 400 plus-page Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. The strength of Boyle and Sorkin’s movie is that it gives us a feel for what Jobs may have been like with the people closest to him. It gives us the illusion of intimacy. Significantly, we don’t see any of Jobs’ famous keynotes in the film; instead, we get a sense of what it was like to be around, talk to and work with Jobs, to experience his pettiness, pushiness and perfectionism, as well as his personal magnetism and perspicacity.

This is ultimately a film for people interested in interpersonal human drama, for moviegoers whose idea of a special effect is a witty remark. There’s general irony in that. This is a dialogue-rich movie about Steve Jobs, screening amidst a lot of handwringing by people like Jonathan Franzen and Sherry Turkle over whether or not the very technologies Jobs helped usher into the world get in the way of us talking to each other. More than anything, Steve Jobs dramatizes the ways human beings struggle to communicate with each other, regardless of technology. And there’s real pleasure in watching that struggle, especially if the participants are armed with Sorkin’s language.

Unsurprisingly, when the house lights came back on, everybody immediately whipped out their iPhones. But for two hours, we all sat there and watched people talking — just talking — on the silver screen while our own small screens stayed out of sight, if not quite out of mind.

Matt Thomas is a teacher and writer living in Iowa City. He has been using Apple products since he was a kid the 1980s.