Director Danny Boyle has come full circle from slumdog to top-dog millionaire “Steve Jobs” in this breathless biopic of the late great computer visionary.
There’s no shortage of other great visionaries, referenced as the company he keeps along the way: Einstein, Picasso, Bob Dylan, Buckminster Fuller, Martin Luther King — only I’m not trying to put down the iconic subject. I’m just trying to come to grips with the fact that the maddening, peremptory genius was such a jerk, judging by Aaron Sorkin’s equally “visionary” screenplay.
Mr. Sorkin, Oscar winner for his “Social Network” (2010) script, with multiple “West Wing” Emmys on his mantel, structures Jobs’ story around his three biggest product launches. Complex conversations take place during frenzied walks backstage. Mr. Jobs was always on the move and compulsive about things starting and running on time.
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels.
Rating: R for language.
An adopted child, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the ’60s, he was best pals in high school with budding engineer Steve Wozniak and girlfriend Chrisann Brennan. He dropped out of Reed College in 1972 to travel and study Buddhism in India, always considering himself an artistic kinda guy who happened to liked electronics. His hero Edwin Land, of Polaroid fame, hailed the unique people who stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences.
Michael Fassbender in the title role is in frenzied perpetual motion, perpetually barking out cosmic edicts and comic insults with all the noise (and charm) of a Gatling gun, steamrolling all who enter — or dare to cross — his path. Seth Rogen as his amiable co-founder of Apple is tired of being Ringo and wants to be John for a change.
Together, they gained fame and fortune for Apple II, one of first highly successful personal computers. But Mr. Jobs soon saw the greater commercial potential of Xerox’s mouse-driven GUI (graphical user interface), which begat his revolutionary Macintosh and the astonishing desktop publishing industry.
Act One (and launch one) of the film is the 1984 shareholders meeting at which Mr. Jobs introduces the Mac as a successor to IBM’s PC. It’s a closed system, deliberately made incompatible with anything else, and it balks about saying “hello.” Mr. Jobs’ wildly enthusiastic audience doesn’t mind, but Apple’s new CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) minds. Mac’s initial commercial failure gives him ammo for Mr. Jobs’ ouster.
Act Two takes place in 1988. Forced out of Apple, Mr. Jobs has founded NeXT, whose state-of-the-art computer for education and business is unveiled at a lavish comeback event in San Francisco’s Symphony Hall. It’s cost-prohibitive at $9,999, but its innovations include the built-in ethernet port on which Tim Berners-Lee (not Al Gore) would invent the World Wide Web.
Act Three is Mr. Jobs’ 1998 return to Apple, unveiling the iMac with his consummate salesman’s skill — dubbed by friends and foes alike as his “Reality Distortion Field,” from the “Star Trek” episode in which aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force. Mr. Jobs’ mix of charm, charisma, bravado and persistence could convince just about all his listeners of just about anything.
Conflated with these events is his ongoing domestic drama with Chrisann (Katherine Waterston) — he’s a multimillionaire disputing the 94 percent probability of his paternity test while she’s on welfare, cleaning houses to support their daughter, Lisa.
Mr. Jobs liked to quote Wayne Gretzky: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” His life (and this film) assumes more tech knowledge than long-in-the-tooth viewers like me may possess. Suffice to say, his ferocious passion for perfection revolutionized six industries — PCs, animated films, music, phones, tablets and digital publishing — with such cultural-earthquake inventions as the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Pity poor Kate Winslet here, as frumpy Joanna Hoffman, Mr. Jobs’ marketing chief, surgically attached to her clipboard. “Why haven’t we slept together?” he says, late in the game. “Because we’re not in love,” she replies. It’s her best line. The rest of the time, she’s a sounding board for his ideas and straightwoman for his snappy comebacks.
This ambitious character study is intriguing but too full of the screenwriter’s diarrhetic dialogue, and Mr. Boyle’s direction is too nervous TV-jumpy for its own good. In the end, it leaves us mostly (and disturbingly) with Steve Jobs, visionary jerk and bully.
America and the world at large were lucky to have him.
His family, friends and colleagues? Not so much.
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.
First Published: October 23, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
