Steve Jobs (15)

Danny Boyle

A FILM about a computer geek preparing to tell an audience of converts about his latest toy: that hardly sounds like gripping cinema. But when the subject is Steve Jobs – who has possibly impacted on more lives than anyone this century – and the filmmakers are top notch, it suddenly becomes so.

You don't need to be a gadget fiend to be thrilled by Steve Jobs. Jet-propelled by Aaron Sorkin's script, well-directed by Danny Boyle and with a spellbinding central performance by Michael Fassbender, this isn’t an Apple wet dream but a character-driven drama that reflects on how someone can be inspirational, and a visionary, yet still a bit of a heel.

Though based on biography of the Apple founder, the film bears all the hallmarks of its scriptwriter, who won an Oscar for The Social Network – about Mark Zuckerberg's creation of Facebook – and seems to have become a chronicler of the digital revolution.

As ever, Sorkin’s "walk and talk" script fizzes with intelligence, wit and rhythmic energy. It’s a joy just to listen to this film. Rather than present a standard, A-Z biopic, Sorkin has structured a story around three of the late showman's famous project launches – the pioneering Macintosh, in 1984, the NeXTcube in 1988, developed by Jobs's new company after he was ousted from Apple, then in 1998, the iMac, the computer that signalled both his successful return to Apple and his embrace of the internet.

Each section imagines the behind-the-scenes build-up to these launches, during which Jobs must deal with last-minute technical glitches while engaging in charged exchanges with the same handful of people, including his head of marketing Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), computer wizard Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the man he brought in to run Apple, and former lover Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston). These encounters depict a web of messed up human relations: the mentor coming to terms with being ostracised; the equal now struggling for recognition; a woman whose daughter Jobs refuses to recognise as his own.

The only person with no axe to grind is Hoffman, who Winslet engagingly presents as a strong, all-purpose right-hand woman: fixer, arbiter, advisor and maybe even friend, which is saying something given that her boss has such a gift for alienation. But Hoffman is still a satellite; for the film to succeed, someone had to make its icy centre compelling. The fantastic Fassbender does exactly that.

The Irishman doesn't need to look like Jobs. The physical transformations – from early hippy, to smoothly suited, to the iconic polo-necked iJobs – are bread and butter for a man who's played a hunger striker and a robot. More impressive is the way he conveys the contradictory characteristics – cruelty and narcissism, with humour; inspirational leadership with destructive paranoia; the idealistic desire to make a "bicycle for the mind" that everyone could own, with Machiavellian levels of manipulation and secrecy. Sorkin's dialogue trips off his tongue like nectar.

At one point, Wozniak reproaches his friend with the observation that: "It's not binary. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.” Sorkin and Fassbender map out a journey in which the man might become as touchy-feely as his products.

From Shallow Grave to Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle's direction has tended to have an in-your-face signature style. Here he's taken a more back-seat approach, making choices – of setting, shooting style, music – that set the scene of each, contrasting segment and lets the language and acting carry the load. It’s a mature piece of work, from a director with nothing to prove.

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