'Jobs' review: Kutcher's fine, but film's timing is off 
 
 Ashton Kutcher renders Steve Jobs sympathetic, making us believe that we're seeing a peculiar strain of a great man. Ashton Kutcher renders Steve Jobs sympathetic, making us believe that we're seeing a peculiar strain of a great man. Photo: Glen Wilson, Open Road Films 
 
 Ashton Kutcher (left) and Josh Gad star as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in "Jobs," a new biography. Ashton Kutcher (left) and Josh Gad star as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in "Jobs," a new biography. Photo: Glen Wilson, Open Road Films 
 
 Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak and Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013. Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak and Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013. Photo: Glen Wilson, Open Road Films 
 
 Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013. Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013. Photo: Glen Wilson, Open Road Films 
 
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 Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013 Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013 Photo: Glen Wilson, Open Road Films 
 
 Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs, and Ron Eldard as Rod Holt in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013 Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak, Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs, and Ron Eldard as Rod Holt in JOBS, opening August 16, 2013 Photo: Glen Wilson, Open Road Films 
 
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 Jobs 
 
 Drama. Starring Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad. Directed by Joshua Michael Stern. (PG-13. 122 minutes.) 
 
 For most of its running time, "Jobs" is a satisfying account of the career of Steve Jobs, who rose to become one of the great entrepreneurs and technological innovators of our era. In the last half hour, the movie slows down and starts to disappoint, and yet not so much that people with a particular interest in Jobs or the history of computers should avoid seeing it. At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good. 
 
 Surprisingly, it doesn't fail in the ways some might expect. Ashton Kutcher is perfectly convincing as Jobs from his first minutes onscreen. He looks like him, walks like him, and he gets into his skin. He looks at people the way Jobs looked at people, arrogantly, quizzically, skeptically, often amused but not especially friendly. And yet somehow Kutcher renders Jobs sympathetic, by making us believe that we're seeing some peculiar strain of a great man. 
 
 The movie avoids the obvious trap of whitewashing Jobs' personality and character. Far from it. By the time his first boss tells him, "You're good, you're damn good, but you're an -hole," audiences all over the world will be nodding their head. This is a guy who picks up a girl and chooses the moment he's sitting up in bed, putting his pants back on, to announce that he has a girlfriend. Later, when his girlfriend becomes pregnant, he has these consoling words for her: "I'm sorry you have a problem, but it's not happening to me. Get out of my house." 
 
 He bullies people, flies into rages. When he was starting out with computer genius Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad), Jobs even cheats his sweet-natured friend out of more than $2,000. "Jobs" presents us with a man best seen from a distance, a coldhearted person who takes pride in his coldness, who sees it as a form of strength. This characterization benefits the movie, making Jobs into someone we keep wanting to circle back to, and examine, and try to understand. 
 
 The film begins with a brief intro, set in 2001, in which Jobs introduces the iPod at a company meeting. Then we go back into the past and see Jobs at Reed College in Oregon, still auditing classes after having dropped out, discovering Eastern philosophy and calligraphy and taking hallucinogenic drugs. 
 
 Eventually, he teams up with Wozniak and, in his parents' basement, they devise the first home computer. This is a familiar story, but, like the story of Edison and the lightbulb and Bell and the telephone, it never really gets old. 
 
 Jobs, although not at all lovable, is certainly admirable. Before he is anybody, he has remarkable self-command and poise, and he understands something about the marketplace that few ever grasp: It's not just a matter of giving people what they want. It's about giving people what they don't know they want. It's about anticipating need and desire, and it's also about elegance. It's about marrying beauty and function. 
 
 A little bit more on what Jobs' and Wozniak's early machines actually did would have been welcome. Instead, the movie gets more and more bogged down in business details, which are interesting for a time, but not wholly absorbing. 
 
 Another problem is that when Jobs is in conflict with his board of directors, it's not entirely certain whose side is right. We see Jobs spending lavishly and bullying his underlings, but we also see him insisting on quality. 
 
 But the main flaw of "Jobs" is that it limits itself to the ancient history of Jobs' rise and fall and rise at Apple. The movie might begin in 2001, but it never returns to the 21st century. Thus, all the dramatic events of Jobs' last dozen or so years aren't dealt with at all. There was the cancer that was supposed to be immediately fatal, that instead turned out to have a better prognosis. There was the iPhone, which changed the way people live their lives, then the iPad. 
 
 What could be more dramatic than a man, living with a death sentence, who keeps coming up with amazing, world-changing devices, just in a brief span of years? That's when Jobs went from a computer pioneer/entrepreneur to becoming one of the architects and designers of modern life. It's the 21st century Jobs who was the great man, not the earlier incarnation. 
 
 "Jobs" should have ended with Jobs' death, because that's really where the story ended. Instead, when the end comes, it feels arbitrary. ||||| Actor Ashton Kutcher, who is the lead actor in the movie, bears a striking physical resemblance to Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder and the flick's namesake. With “Jobs,” Kutcher said he hopes his performance is as much a lesson about entrepreneurship to today's youths as it is a profile of a man who revolutionized technology. While Kutcher managed to embody Jobs physically, it was still hard not to picture Kutcher as his "That '70s Show" character, Kelso. 
 
 Actor: Ashton Kutcher Actor Ashton Kutcher, who is the lead actor in the movie, bears a striking physical resemblance to Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder and the flick's namesake. With “Jobs,” Kutcher said he hopes his performance is as much a lesson about entrepreneurship to today's youths as it is a profile of a man who revolutionized technology. While Kutcher managed to embody Jobs physically, it was still hard not to picture Kutcher as his "That '70s Show" character, Kelso. Glen Wilson/AP 
 
 The movie about the famed Apple co-founder hits theaters on Friday. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama takes a look at some of the major characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts. 
 
 The movie about the famed Apple co-founder hits theaters on Friday. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama takes a look at some of the major characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts. 
 
 The movie about the famed Apple co-founder hits theaters on Friday. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama takes a look at some of the major characters in the movie and their real-life counterparts. 
 
 At the risk of damning with faint praise, it should be noted that Ashton Kutcher is not a disaster in “Jobs.” A dramatization of the life of Apple founder and chief executive Steve Jobs, the movie opens with a brief prologue showing Kutcher, in a graying beard, at the 2001 unveiling of the iPod music player. The film then leaps backward to the 1970s, when a barefoot and much younger Jobs is about to become a Reed College dropout. 
 
 The shaggy-haired hippie kid is far more comfortable territory for Kutcher, who, in his mid-30s, still looks and sounds like a boy. Flashing back to the character as a young man helps the audience get used to Kutcher in the role. The initial shock of seeing the baby-faced actor playing a 46-year-old man subsides, allowing his portrayal to grow on you — and Kutcher to grow into the part — as the character matures. The film follows Jobs from the creation of Apple Computer in his parents’ garage to his 1985 firing and triumphant return to the company in 1996. 
 
 Kutcher does a couple of things well, aping Jobs’s guarded, tight-lipped smile and familiar, half-hunching, half-bouncing gait, even if at times they seem more like ill-fitting mannerisms than expressions of Jobs’s driven personality. But there’s a void inside the man that Kutcher never manages to fill. 
 
 The problem is not with the actor but with the film itself. 
 
 Directed by Joshua Michael Stern (“Swing Vote”) and written by first-time screenwriter Matt Whiteley, “Jobs” confuses the story of Apple, the company, with the story of its guru and guiding force, spending way too much time on backroom personnel dealings than on encounters that might help us understand, on a deep level, the title character. Admittedly, the story of Jobs’s entrepreneurship is a fascinating one in its own right, and the film makes it clear that he was as much a corporate shark as a creative visionary. 
 
 Yet even as the movie tracks the ups and down of Jobs’s career, it gets bogged down in the fate of other, less central — and frankly less interesting — players. Is the film’s abridged parade of Apple CEOs — Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney), John Sculley (Matthew Modine) and Gil Amelio (Kevin Dunn) — really of interest to anyone besides Apple geeks? 
 
 Focusing on those details, “Jobs” gives short shrift to the story’s human side. There’s an initial suggestion that Jobs’s relationship with his daughter with an ex-girlfriend will be an important theme. But it’s ultimately handled in only the most cursory way. We see their relationship begin as estrangement, revealing a nasty side of the film’s subject and showing that the filmmakers aren’t afraid of honesty. Much later, however, when it’s clear that there has been a reconciliation, the connective tissue is missing. It would be nice to see how Jobs and his daughter repaired their relationship. 
 
 Instead, the vast majority of the movie concerns his professional life, giving an unfortunate new meaning to the film’s title. 
 
 One exception is Jobs’s friendship and partnership with Steve “Woz” Wozniak (Josh Gad). As Apple’s sweetly geeky co-founder, Gad is a real pleasure, and his scenes with Kutcher help us understand Jobs, even when — maybe especially when — the two are awkwardly parting ways, late in the film. If the movie has a point, it’s that Jobs may have been a genius but that he was no saint. When he’s firing a low-level Apple staffer because the employee doesn’t care enough about computer type fonts, it’s both funny and painful (and, yes, a bit gratifying). 
 
 Although I think I could watch a whole movie called “Woz” and not grow tired, “Jobs” eventually begins to suffer from an ailment common to many biopics: milestone fatigue. The film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights. What made this famously private man tick? 
 
 Kutcher tries to tell us, but “Jobs” keeps getting in the way. It’s probably a good thing that the story stops in the mid-1990s, instead of following the narrative all the way to Jobs’s death, from pancreatic cancer, in 2011. If it were any more thorough, it could be a CNBC miniseries. I’m just not sure that it would be more illuminating. 
 
 ★½ 
 
 PG-13. At area theaters. Contains obscenity, brief sensuality and drug use. 127 minutes. 
 
 RELATED: 
 
 A Q&A with director Joshua Michael Stern and actor Josh Gad 
 
 2011 obituary: Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, dies ||||| This is a summary. To read the whole story subscribe to BostonGlobe.com 
 
 JOBS 
 
 The first of two biopics of the late founder of Apple (another written by Aaron Sorkin is in development) features a compelling performance by Ashton Kutcher in the title role but otherwise reduces the life to a series of inspirations, tirades, and motivational speeches set in corporate boardrooms. 
 
 It seems like an extended Apple ad, with a few gossipy asides, but less entertaining. 
 
 Full story for BostonGlobe.com subscribers. 
 
 MPAA Rating: PG-13 | MPAA rating reasons: some drug content and brief strong language | Running Time: 127 minutes | Cast: Ashton Kutcher, Dermot Mulroney, Josh Gad, Lukas Haas, Matthew Modine, J.K. Simmons, Lesley Ann Warren | Director: Joshua Michael Stern | Writer: Matt Whiteley | Playing at: Boston Common | 
 
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– It looks as though most critics are ready to throw apples at the new Jobs flick, starring Ashton Kutcher and directed by Joshua Michael Stern. They say it focuses too much on Steve Jobs' professional life and not enough on his personal life, and ends up being something less entertaining than an Apple ad. Perhaps Jobs' next biopic, currently in development, will have better luck. Kutcher gives a "compelling performance" but otherwise the film "reduces [Jobs'] life to a series of inspirations, tirades, and motivational speeches," writes Peter Keough at the Boston Globe. "It seems like an extended Apple ad, with a few gossipy asides, but less entertaining." Michael O'Sullivan at the Washington Post concedes "Kutcher is not a disaster" but agrees that the film focuses too much on the professional, "giving an unfortunate new meaning to the film's title." Josh Gad, however, stands out as Steve Wozniak. "I think I could watch a whole movie called Woz," he writes. Put simply, "it would drive Steve Jobs nuts to know that the new movie about his life has all the sex appeal of a PowerPoint presentation," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. "The Great Man theory of history that's recycled in this movie is inevitably unsatisfying ... After a while, you don't care." Mick LaSalle isn't so harsh, calling Jobs a "satisfying account" in the San Francisco Chronicle. "In the last half hour, the movie slows down and starts to disappoint," but not the to degree that Jobs/Apple/computer fans will be turned off. "At its best, it's a good picture, and at its worst, it's almost good."