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Created Oct 24, 2015 10:14PM PST • Edited Mar 19, 2023 03:26PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   Steve Jobs iconified the foundation myth of Silicon Valley: brash, brilliant, started in a garage, changed the world, got stupidly rich. It was done before him and it’s been done several times since, but never as purely or dramatically. His career had more twists than a double-helix. Wannabe Steves populate the Valley today.

   He’s thus an ideal subject for a Great Man theory of history biopic, though that wouldn’t be sufficiently interesting for 21st century audiences. Instead, Steve Jobs spends equal time on the great man’s feet of clay, mostly his conditional relationship with the daughter he denied and his abusive management tactics.

   It’s a brilliant and bracing movie, structured around three SteveNotes, the legendary product launches he perfected. The original Macintosh is the first, followed by the NeXT cube he launched while in exile. Then the candy-colored iMac became his first undisputed hit. The 14 years separating first from last creates enough time to see him perfect his methods and work through his tortured relationships – the man in full.

   For those of us who lived through those halcyon days, it’s a trip down memory lane, complete with a backstage look at the man behind the curtain. He was often ugly, “poorly made” as he described himself.

   He’s often emulated in today’s Silicon Valley, with real and wannabe tech titans wielding imperious power over their minions. But there was only one Jobs, and it was his vision, not his bile, that made him great.

   Steve Jobs becomes the second great movie about Silicon Valley, after The Social Network. I said then that Jobs was lucky enough to start Apple before social media turned techies into obsessive personal documentarians. Given Walter Isaacson’s tremendous biography, even that didn’t prevent this warts-n-all biopic. Steve Jobs crashes through Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field. And that’s the hardest crash of all.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Michael Fassbender’s Steve Jobs is outstanding work, even if Fassbender is actually moviestar handsome. He’s also a German who enunciates flawlessly in Cupertinize. Bravo. Fassbender knows how to pause before a big moment, making him ideal to play the man behind the SteveNote launches.

   Kate Winslet spends most every moment on screen with him as Joanna Hoffman, his marketing head and work-wife on the original Mac team and the NeXT team. The British Winslet plays the Polish-American Hoffman at perfect wit’s end, another superlative performance by one of the best actresses working today.

   • Seth Rogen pulls off Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple and creator of the Apple I and Apple II. Rogen as The Woz. Of course.
   • Jeff Daniels is too beefy to look like lean John Sculley, Apple’s CEO from 1983 to 1993, recruited by Jobs from being the president of Pepsi. Yet Daniels is such a consummate actor that he neatly pulls off the role of Father Figure to Steve Jobs.
   • Katherine Waterston plays Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’ former girlfriend and Lisa’s mother.
   • Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Makenzie Moss as Lisa Brennan-Jobs (at different ages), the daughter of Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan.
   • Michael Stuhlbarg represents Andy Hertzfeld in strong yet vulnerable fashion. Hertzfeld was one of Jobs’ Geniuses, who the great man routinely hammered for more and better code.
   • Sarah Snook as Andrea “Andy” Cunningham, an entrepreneur and collaborator with Jobs for several product launches at Apple. She’s the second Andy, along with Hertzfeld.
   • Adam Shapiro as Avie Tevanian, who designed NextStep, which became Mac OS X when Apple bought NeXT, bringing Steve back to Apple.
   • John Ortiz as Joel Pforzheimer, a journalist for GQ who interviews Jobs throughout the film.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Really Great 4.5

8. Male Costars Really Great 4.5

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Aaron Sorkin works from Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography with his usual verve. There’s simply no better screenwriter of dialogue for smart people in motion. Of course, Sorkin always has them walking, walking and talking.

    Sorkin has now also perfected another staple of his canon: juxtaposing a young daughter to a powerful man, here with Lisa Jobs, the daughter Steve initially denies. He did it in Moneyball with Billy Beane’s daughter.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

    Danny Boyle take a bow. Steve would hate you with a passion that burns brighter than an overheated core processor, but he’d appreciate the look and feel of your film, which is Apple to its very core.

12. Play Really Great 4.5

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.5

    Emotional violence barely pushes up the edginess score. It hurts pretty bad for those targeted, however.

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Gentle 1.1

19. Rudeness Salty 1.9

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Sorkin’s story has plenty of cinematic moments, suggesting it exercises more than a little artistic license, also known as hype, or lying. You could call it lying.

    Reality distortion aside, several actual reality observations get triggered by Steve Jobs.

    • Adoptees fixate on being given up, rather than being chosen, observes John Scully. “It’s the loss of control” says Steve.
    • Jobs only had unconditional love for intellectual power, ideally artistic intellectual power. In a scene too cinematic to be true, he finally warms to his daughter when she draws a brilliant abstract in MacPaint. Pity the poor girl if she was a dullard.
    • I saw Steve hosting a large dinner at Osteria in Palo Alto while exiled from Apple, just pre-NeXT.
    • This review written on a 2014 MacBook Air, as sweet and solid a machine as Steve ever imagined.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0