Performing 'Steve Jobs'
Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs. Image: Universal.

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Performing 'Steve Jobs'

Aaron Sorkin's film takes a deep look at Steve Job's life on the public stage.

It's fitting that Steve Jobs, the film about the man behind our most ubiquitous future-forward personal technologies, is staged as if were a play, one of our oldest dramatic mediums. The story is less a study of the tech titan than a grand, Shakespearean drama about delusion, power, and redemption—kind of like King Lear shown in reverse. With less madness, more Macs. But still a decent heap of madness.

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The film unfolds over the course of just three set pieces, each taking place mere minutes before one of Jobs's infamous product launches: First, the unveiling of the storied Macintosh in 1984, then the failed NEXT (Jobs' early effort at an educational computer) in 1988, and finally, the Apple-resuscitating iMac in 1998.

Through each, the major players in Jobs' early-to-midlife period—his daughter, whom he initially sociopathically refuses to acknowledge as such, her mother, whom he scorns and treats cruelly, Macintosh's head of marketing Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), who serves as his confidant and occasional moral compass, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), whom he loves but never fails to contemptuously trample over, CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), who is presented as an outmatched father figure—all cycle through the backstage chambers, relaying long-simmering grievances, unsolicited advice, and pleas for help.

We get the bullet points of the now-standard Steve Jobs dramatic arc. A brilliant, petulant man insists that consumers don't know what they want. That customization is the enemy and good design is the king. That products should be closed off and controlled. He founds Apple, finds success, then pushes the simple-but-beautiful Macintosh. The world isn't ready. He sticks to his guns, endures a string of failures, is an asshole to everyone in his path, and is brought back into the fold at Apple to right a sinking ship. He is redeemed, first with the iMac, then, it is hinted, with the iPod and the iPhone—the most popular gadgets of our era, maybe ever.

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He is an immensely difficult man, but one that had the gumption and pathology necessary to revolutionize consumer electronics.

It's a very interesting film, one that looks and feels nothing like Sorkin's previous foray into tech guruship, The Social Network, or that other Jobs biopic that no one really remembers anything about except for a few press photos of Ashton Kutcher in a turtleneck. And Danny Boyle's direction is laser-focused and assured. But the film's not really about Steve Jobs—it's about megalomania, obsession, redemption, and, most of all, maybe, it's about performance.

The setting is always a stage, and though we only get glimpses of the keynote Jobs intends to deliver to his tech-hungry audiences, the suggestion seems to be that the man who built his life around creating things to show off on that stage was always performing, even when he wasn't expressly aware of it. (Though mostly, he was.)

Performing to the media and consumers (the world-changing Steve Jobs), to the family he was intent on abandoning (the non-culpable non-father Steve Jobs), to the business partner he knew he needed but sort of disdained (always-faithful Steve Jobs), and to (gasp!) HIMSELF, the adopted son who needed to prove himself extraordinary (over-achieving, incessantly correct Steve Jobs).

"I'm the only one who knows that this guy is someone you invented," Woz says at one point.

Some of these plot lines seemed a little pat—it often felt like the film sought to amplify the caricature of Jobs rather than explore the nuance of his character. But maybe that was the point; if the film is about Jobs-as-performer, it makes sense to magnify his myth rather than explode it.

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Film still via Universal

The film challenges us to think about why, perhaps, we're drawn to his performance, why we need it to understand the largest private company in the world and the products it makes. It's a question Woz asks at one point in the film—he asks, essentially, why Jobs gets the credit. Woz built the Apple computer. Woz made the company profitable. Woz made Jobs possible. But while Woz has his of sympathetic followers, it's Jobs we're obsessed with.

It's telling, too, that technology is nearly entirely absent from the film—it's there as a prop; for Jobs' daughter to scribble abstract art on, to sit center stage as a beautiful object, to be tinkered with, briefly, for metaphorical import.

Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay, said in a Q+A following the press screening that he's always been more comfortable writing plays than films, and that's what we've got here—an old-fashioned play about the ultimate new-fashioned man.

Part of the reason Apple maintains its edge over Samsung and the rest of the competition is that their products weren't made by a tortured genius. The myth of Steve Jobs hovers over every sleek, intuitive—and, yes, closed ecosystem—Apple product we buy, and fuels investor confidence in the company even today; he's a ghost mascot for the world's biggest company.

As I left the theater, I was dissatisfied with a lot of elements of the film: Michael Fassbender was too sexy and straightforward-intense to be a convincing Jobs; the film never captured his disarmingly geeky side, and where was his wife (who, coincidentally, is upset about the film, though she hasn't seen it, and tried to stop it from getting made) in the last act, or any depiction of the iPhone? Where was the tech that did infiltrate our daily lives in such a profound way, and how did Jobs interact with it? We didn't learn much new about Steve Jobs or his inner life, etc etc.

After sleeping on it, I don't think that's the point. It's not a perfect film—it's relentlessly bombastic, veers into cheesiness at times, and the Sorkinness can get a little thick in certain exchanges—but it forces us to explore the foundations of our Apple worship head-on. It literally puts the myth of Jobs center stage.