This is the killer app.
After what seems like dozens of attempts at the story of the Apple co-founder, director Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs” is, far and away, the best of the bunch and one of the year’s best films.
I regularly dismiss biopic-ish features based on a simple litmus: Could a documentary have done it better? Nine times out of 10, the answer’s “yes.”
But “Steve Jobs” does something no documentary could. It creates a masterful fiction from the truth: a three-act examination of a man who many claimed operated like he was a god. Even if it is an easy analogy, the film is like a brilliantly engineered computer.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “The Newsroom”) provides the underlying coding: a measured and complex narrative that operates as a cinematic Rorschach test — do you see the monster or the genius?
The software: A career-best performance by one of the best actors in the world right now, Michael Fassbender (“Shame,” “Prometheus”), and countless incredible supporting efforts. Chief among them are Kate Winslet as Jobs’ long-suffering marketing chief Joanna Hoffman, and Michael Stuhlbarg (“A Serious Man,” “Boardwalk Empire”) as Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld, both of whom act as stand-ins for anyone who ever fell victim to Jobs’ frequently supercilious ways.
But the most-affecting encounters Jobs faces are with ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston, “Inherent Vice”) and daughter Lisa, who have as much luck as anyone outside of Apple exec John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) in putting cracks in Jobs’ façade of do-no-wrong, world-changing tech maestro.
Fassbender doesn’t look the part in the uncanny way that Ashton Kutcher did in 2013’s “Jobs,” in the same way that Seth Rogen isn’t immediately a dead ringer for Apple’s Steve Wozniak. As obsessive as Jobs the man and Jobs the character are with Apple products achieving perfection, “Steve Jobs” is brave enough to simply do the costuming and makeup and allow these actors to play to the emotion of their characters and the story rather than try for flawless impersonation. “Steve Jobs” is not an attempt to recreate history, but instead to use the medium to create a story that exquisitely finds a way to convey competing truths and allow the viewer to decide.
Claustrophobic and zealously paced, it remains thrilling despite most of the film consisting of Sorkin’s patented walk-and-talks or other actionless dialogues set in dressing rooms and corridors at various product launch events.
As for the hardware? It’ll probably come in the form of those golden statues handed out at the Oscars.
“Steve Jobs” is rated R. Two hours, 2 minutes. Four and a half stars out of five.