The vision of Steve Jobs

Last week I went to a screening of Steve Jobs, the new biopic about the co-founder of Apple directed by Danny Boyle, and I was impressed. It’s structured like a three-act play, with each act set backstage at the launch of a new product — in 1984, 1988 and 1998 — and then unfolding in real time. Superficially, the film is about the gradual ascent of Apple (and Steve Jobs) as the dominant force in the personal computer industry, but beneath the surface it’s about much more than that. As portrayed by Michael Fassbender, Jobs isn’t just a common or garden perfectionist. He’s neurotic, obsessive, driven, ruthless and almost inhumanly oblivious to the needs of others, including his own daughter. For Jobs, the perambulator in the hall isn’t an enemy of promise, as it is for most ambitious people. He simply doesn’t notice it.

Tim Cook, the current chief executive of Apple, has criticised the film for portraying his predecessor in an unflattering light, but that’s only half true. One of the subplots of Steve Jobs revolves around his complicated relationship with Steve Wozniak, the other co-founder of Apple, who — in the film, at least — resents the fact that his childhood friend attracts more attention than he. Wozniak questions Jobs’s contribution to the development of Apple’s products — ‘What is it that you do, exactly?’ — and accuses him of hogging all the credit for an essentially collaborative enterprise.

But this doubting Thomas never convinces. As played by Seth Rogen, Wozniak is a whiney beta male, a discarded lover of Fassbender’s Sun King. No, the film leaves you in little doubt that Steve Jobs was an out-and-out genius. In every scene he battles to protect his vision of what the ideal desktop computer should look like, right down to the tiniest detail.