London Film Festival 2015: Steve Jobs, review – Fassbender shines as a brainbox behaving badly

Aaron Sorkin’s machine-gun dialogue is at its best with every line a cracker, and Michael Fassbender is terrific as a hateful but undeniable Steve Jobs, says David Sexton
David Sexton5 November 2015

Aaron Sorkin scores again.

Despite having little interest in new technology, Sorkin has — just as he did with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in The Social Network — once more ruthlessly reduced an enormous contemporary phenomenon to his own sturdily theatrical concept of drama.

Although loosely based on Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of Jobs, it’s not a biopic. Instead, there are three acts. Each shows us Jobs behaving monstrously badly behind the scenes before the public launch of key products in giant auditoria: the Macintosh in 1984, NeXT (after being temporarily sacked from Apple) in 1988 and the iMac in 1998, after resuming control.

In each section, there’s a clock ticking down, just the kind of wind-up that director Danny Boyle likes. But, although each act is filmed differently (16mm, 35mm, digital), by the time we’ve reached the last, even Jobs himself comments on the repetitive structure: “It’s as if five minutes before every launch, everyone goes to the bar, gets drunk and tells me what they really think.”

Steve Jobs the film, 2015 - in pictures

1/5

Realising that the history of Apple devices may not be everyone’s emotional trigger, Sorkin has introduced a tearfully plangent sub-plot about Jobs’s dysfunctional relationship with his daughter Lisa (played by three actresses) and her erratic mother. The fact that by 1998 Jobs was married and had other children is omitted, as is his entire Eastern and Buddhist influence.

Yet it works. Sorkin’s machine-gun dialogue is at its best, every line a cracker (so that when Jobs finally admits, “I’m poorly made”, it hits you). Kate Winslet contributes a fine performance as his battered “work-wife” Joanna Hoffman and, as Jobs, hateful but undeniable, Michael Fassbender is terrific, much better than as Macbeth, an Oscar-contender for sure.

Cert 15, 122 mins

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