Approaching a biopic is difficult enough, even when the subject of the film isn’t an icon as known, beloved, and hated as Steve Jobs. Do you follow his legacy? Do you retread what people already know about him? Do you expose the audience to a difficult, arrogant genius knowing that it may impact how they care for him as a character?
Steve Jobs is more of a concept film at heart than a true biopic, as writer Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle add sparks of revelation to an old and quick-to-stale genre by giving us exclusive backstage access to three landmark moments in Steve’s life — the moments before three of his biggest product launches.
This scenic structure separates Steve Jobs from many biopics of its ilk, making it almost theatrical in presentation, and surprisingly unpredictable.
It’s all lodged firmly in the pages of history, but that doesn’t matter thanks to the slow unraveling of events and the ensuing guessing game about what happened in between each product launch. We all know that the Titanic sinks. We all know that Apple wins in the end. But the film makes history irrelevant by focusing on the sticky relationships of the characters. This isn’t a story of if Steve will be able to launch these products; it’s a story about what it will cost to do it the way Steve wants.
Danny Boyle delivers his stars in excellent acting form, but his visuals prove to be heavily contrasting set-pieces to an otherwise completely lucid storytelling structure. However, his obsession for design pays off tremendously in the form of symbolic scenic settings that illustrate the major confrontations in Jobs’ life. He also uses his visual language to connect themes like Jobs’ abandonment issues and his thirst for perfection and style, but these bits of flair sometimes feel intrusive in a film that for all intents and purposes sounds like a stage play.
Sorkin’s script mesmerizes and attempts a biopic almost on level with a Shakespearean history. We barely have any moments at all without Michael Fassbender’s Steve Jobs, and the scenes rush along with such a hypnotizing intensity that it’s easy to forget that they’re 40 minutes long. Fassbender melts into the character and creates a voice perfectly intimidating and adolescent, capturing Jobs’ eternal struggle for control and making the audience absolutely lap up any scene with him in it.
Costars Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels all brushed up on their quips and dialogue volleying for a two-hour marathon that could almost pass for stylized. In fact, the only real problem with the movie is the over-intelligence of the script. These people are geniuses after all, but when intense human experiences are expressed in a highly-written form, it can verge on the melodramatic. Steve Jobs walks this tightrope for nearly all of its two-hour running time, but it never tires out the act or overstays its welcome. In fact, by the end you begin to embrace it.
Steve Jobs not only succeeds in telling us three true-to-life stories about Steve and his work, it paints a visual picture of the world during three different times — 1984, 1988, and 1998. It provides a sense of scope on the explosion of the digital frontier, including how history was altered and rewritten for the consumption of later generations. It touches on how the technology that catapulted Jobs to his fame has changed life as we know it, and it has the courage to not take a moral stance on it. In short, it’s the biopic that Steve Jobs deserves.
And it isn’t even a biopic.
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