Steve Jobs

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay

Like a chess grandmaster, Steve Jobs was gifted in seeing how pieces of technology could fit together in ways that made the whole greater than the sum of the parts.  In 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to see the prototype Xerox Alto and its Graphical User Interface, SmallTalk.  Xerox never understood quite what to do with SmallTalk, but Jobs understood it clearly, and proceeded to hijack interface expert Jef Raskin’s low-cost computer project only to turn it into a failure that would, in hindsight, redefine the computer.

Few people watching Danny Boyle’s STEVE JOBS, written by that myth maker of the male ego, Aaron Sorkin, will understand or appreciate that perhaps the most significant milestone in the history of Steve Jobs career was not the iPhone, or the iPod, or even the Macintosh itself.  The true breakthrough was, in fact, a project that in Silicon Valley had come to be known as Marklar—the switch from Motorola microprocessors to Intel.  Doing it meant giving them enough runway to establish a devoted developer and user base to which they could anchor a product ecosystem… the product ecosystem…. that traces its roots to the 1960s—Doug Englebart’s NLS (oN-Line System) prototype, a precursor to network computing, and Alan Kay’s DynaBook concept which manifested itself four decades later as the iPhone and iPad.

The genius of Steve Jobs was not in how he orchestrated his return to Apple, a highly-fictionalized version of which occurs in this film, but rather how he set in motion a ten year roadmap of projects that individually gave away no hints at the Trojan horse to come.  Sadly this remains unexplored in the film, perhaps because Sorkin and Boyle thought it was too smart for their audience, or themselves, to wrap their minds around.

Ninety days away from bankruptcy, Steve Jobs replaced Gil Amelio as interim CEO in 1997 in a boardroom coup that, by most accounts, took place in less than thirty minutes—a direct consequence of acquiring his NeXT, Inc., for their NextSTEP operating system architecture.  This was a necessary move after Copland/OS 8, the successor to the monolithic System 7, met delay after delay and wouldn’t make it to market with some of the critical features needed to compete against Windows—customization, multithreading, pre-emptive multitasking.  But OS X, released as a public beta in 2001 and built on OpenSTEP (the rebranded NextSTEP core), was only the front end of a larger “digital hub” strategy that would make or break the company’s future.

The film opens thirty minutes prior to Steve Jobs’ (Michael Fassbender) introduction of the Macintosh at Flint Center in Cupertino, CA.  His lieutenants: marketing executive Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), systems programmer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg).  Sorkin’s screenplay takes enormous liberties, described by the filmmakers as a “painting” rather than a literal account of events that nobody can fully vet.  In it, they explore Jobs’ relations with pivotal figures in his life through the lens of three thirty-minute segments occurring in real-time and filmed in the dominant medium of the period, each just before a major product launch: the Macintosh, the NeXT computer, and the iMac—the latter being not only the one true successful product of his career, but the fastest-selling computer in history.

It’s a relief to see the filmmakers abandon the formulaic structure of the award-bait biopic in favor of a three-act play that examines its subject through the lens of a critical success that was a commercial failure (Macintosh), a commercial and critical failure that was a technical milestone (NeXT, a workstation on which Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and finally a commercial and critical success (iMac) that Jobs had been chasing his entire life.  But this is only the backdrop against which Boyle and Sorkin attempt to examine the relationships maintained (sometimes poorly) by Steve Jobs.  Here the interesting narrative structure and fantastic performances elevate the writing and direction to pretty well just average.

The actors drive this film to good, but not insanely great heights, as the dialogue seems riddled with hurried exposition and Wikipedia-level research, telegraphing itself all too loudly; you can feel the keystroke of bullet points as important figures such as Dan Kottke and Regis McKenna are glossed over.   Despite the innovative editing, it’s still a conventional three-act structure.  There’s one heated exchange that plays well:  Just prior to the unveiling of the NeXT cube, Jobs gets into it with father figure, confidant and Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), with whom Sorkin wants you to empathize because woe-is-him the public believes he fired Jobs.

Mr. Fassbender, whose acting chops had sharpened under the wing of director Steve McQueen, inhabits his role as the mercurial Jobs by not so much mimicking him as capturing his essence.  Imitation may be regarded as the sincerest form of flattery but it veers off into the Uncanny Valley—so close that the slight difference is always more unsettling than not.  It’s to Fassbender’s credit that he avoids it.  I wasn’t as taken as some critics with Seth Rogen’s performance as Steve Wozniak.  It worked but it’s set aside to focus on less commonly exhausted arcs.  Ms. Winslet and Mr. Stuhlbarg own that space and, while their characters are rattling off, questioning the importance of the zero-draft molding of the NeXT cube or venting frustration at Jobs’ tyrannical attacks, their real purpose is to frame the unfolding relationship between father and daughter.

Steve Jobs remained in denial about fathering Lisa (played in three ages by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla-Haney Jardine; Sobo’s performance is standout), the child of Chrisann Brennan (Catherine Waterston, given little else to do than be a springboard), even after a paternity test proved otherwise.  An orphan himself, the film devotes some attention to Jobs’ conflicting emotions about being rejected by his biological parents.   Ignoring for the moment that the narrative takes considerable liberties with Jobs’ actual life, adapted in part from Walter Isaacson’s biography, a key scene reveals the fictionalized Jobs’ interest in Lisa does an about-face when he sees her creative potential and decides that she must be his child.  One truth: The failed LISA computer’s name, a backronym, stood for Local Integrated Systems Architecture—completely meaningless and absolutely an attempt to obfuscate the notion that Jobs named it after his child.

Beset by pleas from Hoffman and her nurturing instinct (mothering Steve through pre-show insecurities, doubts and distractions) and Hertzfeld’s empathy—berated by Jobs in the presence of coworkers, Jobs relents, giving appropriate financial assistance to Chrisann (in a rather backhanded manner); he takes an active role in Lisa’s parenting.  Has the Scumbag Billionaire grown a soul?   The film certainly isn’t lacking other Sorkinisms, including the set-walking dialogues employed almost to self-parody in The West Wing.  Apropos, enter the one-two downshot to absolve Sorkin of seeming too infatuated with creative assholes:

First: Woz literally tells Steve that one can be creative and not be an asshole.  Second: One has the inkling that Jobs was such a chess player that the idea of having a child fit his mythical narrative: What a story it would have made if his first successful project were named for his daughter.  Steve Jobs was, in fact, just narcissistic enough to ponder having a child for the express purpose of naming a computer after her.

Imagine if it had been a success.