Steve Jobs: A Troubled Genius Of Silicon Valley

Rating: 8/10 (17 May 2018)

Genius is often a tough thing to define; and for the person that is frequently defined as a genius, it can lead to a feeling of invincibility, a feeling that you know more than anyone else, inherent insecurity, and indifference. A fair amount of that was very true of Steve Jobs, the co-founder, with Steve Wozniak, in 1976 of Apple, which over the ensuing two decades of turmoil and enormous growth became one of the biggest technological corporations on the planet. His death from a pancreatic tumor in the fall of 2011 at the shockingly early age of 56 led to a stream of films, documentary and feature alike. One of those was the 2015 opus STEVE JOBS.
Based on Walter Isaacson's hugely successful biography that included a lot of interviews with the man, STEVE JOBS stars Michael Fassbender as the "resident genius" of the explosive Silicon Valley technological scene of the 1980s always busy dreaming up new technological marvels, and parsing off blame on others when things don't go according to his own version of Hoyle. Indeed, his reactions to his former colleagues, like Wozniak (Seth Rogan) and former Pepsi chairman John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), and even his own marketing executive Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), are ones of almost intolerable cruelty, including Daniels having axed Fassbender from Apple, and Rogan pointing out in graphic detail how much he, and not Fassbender, created the computers and operating systems that made Apple a technological giant in the first place. And then flesh-and-blood reality in the form of a former girlfriend of his (Katherine Waterston) and her daughter, intrude; and he Fassbender is eventually forced to confront the failures in his rise to the top that were caused by his cold obsession with "changing the world".
Fassbender does not have an easy job in his portrayal of Jobs, largely because he has to get into the skin of the techno-genius, and that skin is clearly crawling with ego. Truth be told, Fassbender's portrayal really comes across as one of the bigger egomaniacal bastards seen on screen in recent times. This probably has a lot with the real Jobs having been so candid about himself with Isaacson in the book prior to his passing, though such a character, in what passes for today's Hollywood, can be seen as rather repellent. But that would seem to be what Steve Jobs himself was often like, especially during those times that the film focuses on, the roll-outs of new products of Jobs' own skewed creative mind that happened in 1984, 1988, and 1998. It also doesn't hurt that the direction of Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE; 28 DAYS LATER; 127 HOURS), and the screenplay adaptation of Isaacson's book by Aaron Sorkin (A FEW GOOD MEN; THE SOCIAL NETWORK) have both a marvelous technological sheen and a scathingly sardonic edge (peppered with a fair amount of profane bits of dialogue) to it.
Nevertheless, despite (or maybe because of) the realistic, if frequently unsympathetic, portrayal of Jobs by Fassbender, along with Winslet's, Daniels', and Rogan's performances, the film is a very direct look at how being a "genius" with an outsized ego to match can do funny things to those who have both. STEVE JOBS, as such, is worthy of a '9' rating from me.