Backstage with Steve Jobs

Jobs launches three new products and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tries to explore human themes in a high-tech world. .

Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network and whose new movie Steve Jobs now goes into wide release, capitalizes on our bottomless interest in the founder of Apple. At the same, time -- and perhaps in contradictory fashion -- Sorkin asks us to accept that he's not trying to give us a factual portrayal of Jobs' life.

Of course, artists are entitled to take license with the facts as they search for larger truths, but -- let's be honest -- had Sorkin focused his movie on a tremendously successful but often callous executive named Barney McBride -- his project might never have been greenlit.

I say all this by way of telling you that I can't totally buy into Sorkin's approach (expressed in a Charlie Rose interview) that he's not replicating real people, but creating characters -- within limits, of course. Sorkin's screenplay draws on Walter Isaacson's much-lauded 2011 biography, Steve Jobs.

Whether Steve Jobs reflects the reality of the real person in full or only in part can be assessed business historians, but Sorkin's screenplay -- brought to the movies by director Danny Boyle -- charts a lively, if not entirely satisfying, course during three clearly demarcated acts.

Those three acts are constructed around backstage events preceding the launch of three products: the Macintosh computer in 1984; the NeXT cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998.

Sorkin script spends a lot of time on the fraught relationship between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and his daughter Lisa.

It's not that Jobs' relationship with Lisa (he initially denied paternity) is irrelevant to understanding the man (or the character in the movie), it's more that Sorkin may be off base in thinking that this father/daughter tug-of-war is the most telling thing about Jobs. It's a telling thing.

We also get a little too much of Jobs' irritation at being asked for money by Lisa's mother (Katherine Waterston).

Sorkin's great strength is dialogue, so Steve Jobs includes lots of conversations that take place with the rapid fire insistence of a mouse click as we meet the characters who most interest Sorkin:

These include John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the Pepsi executive who took over Apple and who fired Jobs in a dispute over the company's direction. (Twelve years after leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs made a triumphant return to the foundering company. He's credited with turning Apple into one of the most profitable businesses in the world.)

There's also Joanna Hoffman, Apple's marketing genius, who's portrayed by Kate Winslet. Hoffman seems to be the one character who's able to speak truth to Jobs' power.

If the corporate aspects of the movie have a moral center, it belongs to Steve Wozniak, played with patience and determination by Seth Rogen, a nice piece of casting. Woz, as he's called, constantly asks Jobs to do the right thing by acknowledging the team that created the Apple II, the computer that kept the company profitable for a long time.

Fassbender approaches Jobs as a control freak who must juggle 50 different balls at one time, all in the high-stakes atmosphere of a product launch. To this end, Fassbender ably conveys Jobs' focus, intensity and intelligence.

The movie's product-launch backdrop may be the most telling thing about it. Sorkin and Boyle (Slum Dog Millionaire) make it clear that Jobs understood theatrics.

He launched new products in large auditoriums. In front of eager audiences, he shared the spotlight with new Apple products. He gave his user-friendly devices a near celebrity aura, creating a sense of specialness that somehow was supposed to transfer to the consumers of Apple products. (And, yes, I'm one of them.)

I suppose that's part of the point: Jobs could humanize high-tech products, but not himself.

By the movie's final act, Jobs has donned the jeans and black turtle necks that became something of a trademark. He has refashioned himself as a kind of god who brings products down from the digital mountaintop and reveals them to the masses.

Steve Jobs is worth seeing because Sorkin is a clever writer, because the performances are sharp enough to match the brisk pace that Boyle sets, and because much of the byplay is entertaining.

I love the fact that Sorkin takes a shot at Jobs' vaunted design sense when, in the final going, Lisa -- now a Harvard student played by Peria Haney-Jardine -- compares the first iMac to a child's Easy-Bake oven.

Apple users may get more excitement out of a real Apple product launch than they do from a movie that follows on the heels of a documentary about Jobs (The Man in the Machine) and a 2013 bio-pic that cast Ashton Kutcher as Jobs.

Ultimately (and perhaps unfortunately) Sorkin underscores the movie's message: In a climactic scene, he has Woz tell Jobs that it's possible to be both a genius and a compassionate person at the same time. "It's not binary,''says Woz.

Those words needn't have been spoken. They're like an exclamation point on a conclusion that Sorkin should have let us draw for ourselves, and they made me wonder whether the movie shouldn't have been given a subtitle: Steve Jobs, The Nagging of a Genius.

The good, bad and ugly about Steve Jobs

By now, nearly the entire world knows that the late and much-lamented Steve Jobs was a complicated mixture of businessman and artist.

A tech whiz and marketing genius, Jobs twice headed Apple, the company that created whole new behaviors with the introduction of products such as iPods, iPads and, of course, the iPhone.

Director Alex Gibney's new documentary -- Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine -- offers a comprehensive look at Jobs's career, reminding of us of his well-documented abilities and also examining his less-attractive personal traits: a willingness to intimidate subordinates and an equally well-documented denial that he was the father his first-born child, a daughter. (Jobs eventually admitted he behaved badly, and reconciled with his daughter.)

As willing as he is to look at Jobs's personal warts, Gibney also doesn't shy away from examining Apple's seamier side: its use of cheap Chinese labor, a scandal involving backdated stock options and Jobs's control-freak style of management.

Personality and business practices aside, Jobs, more than anyone, helped take the fear out of computing, creating devices that set the current standard for design and user-friendliness.

I don't think Gibney has uncovered a trove of new information, but he knows a good subject when he sees one. Prior to Man in the Machine, Gibney's most recent effort was the HBO documentary Going Clear, a scathing look at the Church of Scientology.

Four years after his death, Jobs continues to fascinate, and Gibney's movie serves as a warm-up for the upcoming Aaron Sorkin-written, Danny Boyle directed bio-pic, which casts Michael Fassbender as Jobs.

That film, entitled Steve Jobs, will have its debut during Labor Day's Telluride Film Festival, and is due in theaters on Oct. 9. (And, yes, for the record, I'm an Apple user.)

Skimming through Steve Jobs's life

Ashton Kutcher isn't bad, but this bio-pic doesn't dig deep.

Put expectation aside, Ashton Kutcher's not bad as Steve Jobs. But Jobs -- the movie about the late icon's rise in the world of business -- is to biography what skimming is to reading, a gloss rather than a deeply revealing look.

What's missing from this uptempo view of Jobs's life has less to do with a refusal to portray Jobs's darker side than with a deficiency of interpretive thrust, the kind of spin that could have lifted the movie out of a familiar, bio-pic groove.

Director Joshua Michael Stern sticks pretty close to the surface, tracing events in Jobs's life and charting the sometimes precarious rise of Apple, the company that's credited with changing the way we compute, make phone calls, listen to music, take photos and use apps for purposes that range from ridiculous to sublime.

In truth, Jobs is less a bio-pic than half of one.

The movie charts Jobs's life from his college days to the time when the ousted genius returned to Apple to guide the company to astonishing levels of success in the world of iPhones, iPods, iPads, as well as personal computers. It's arguable, that Jobs ends just when the best part of the story is starting.p>
To its credit, the movie doesn't attempt to white-wash Jobs: It offers abundant examples of Jobs's arrogance, his cruelty to subordinates, his refusal to acknowledge a daughter, his willingness to shortchange those who supported him early on, and his sense -- as one of the characters puts it -- that the world began and ended with him.

But rather than make a Citizen Jobs-like cautionary tale, Stern balances negatives with an equal number of positives: Jobs's unwillingness to settle for second best, his insistence on accomplishing what others deemed impossible and his commitment to changing lives with technology.

Early on, Stern employs a sketchy montage to show how Jobs toyed with an education at Reed College, dropped out of school, took acid trips, traveled to India and eventually landed a job with Atari, where he quickly established himself as iconoclastic but unpleasant personality. While at Atari, Jobs relied on hardware whiz and pal Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) to help build his reputation as a tech genius.

Jobs and Woznaik started Apple in Jobs's parents garage, and -- as the saying goes -- the rest is history.

Much of the movie is devoted to corporate intrigue within Apple, which outgrew its humble origins once it expanded into its Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. The company went public, acquired stockholders, a board of directors and eventually hired CEO John Sculley (Matthew Modine), a skilled marketer who found himself at odds with Jobs's idiosyncratic approach.

Jobs evidently behaved like a movie director who wasn't about to let a little thing like budget stand in the way of his vision.

Kutcher looks a lot like the young Jobs, and the supporting cast does reasonably good work with Dermot Mulroney portraying Mike Markkula, the first outsider to sink major money into Apple.

Though briskly paced, Jobs offers little or nothing by way of breakthrough filmmaking, and it can play like a compilation of greatest hits from Jobs's already well-chronicled career: How he named the company, how he developed the Macintosh computer line and how he made the transition from a young man with counter-cultural interests to a Silicon Valley titan.

If Jobs hadn't made his mark with computers, the movie could have been a show-biz bio-pic about a temperamental star who annoyed lots of people and made oodles of money, but actually did what many other arrogant people couldn't: He delivered.

Listen, I'm an Apple guy. I'm writing this on an Apple computer, and I use other Apple products. I'm susceptible to the Apple glow. Apple makes it, and, yes, I tend to want it.

But Jobs could have been a far more insightful drama. The movie shows us a character who does plenty of acting out, but it does far too little digging in.