Steve Jobs Review

The structure is the argument. Aaron Sorkin refuses biography and stages three real time backstage sequences instead, so the film becomes a portrait built entirely from confrontation, and Danny Boyle shoots each act on a different format so the picture physically ages from grainy sixteen millimeter to clean digital as its subject hardens. The photography makes that idea legible rather than decorative.

Michael Fassbender declines an impression and plays the coldness and the need underneath it, while Kate Winslet's Joanna Hoffman is the film's spine, the only person permitted to tell him the truth. Rogen's Wozniak carries the moral weight and delivers the picture's most direct question with unexpected gravity. Jeff Daniels and Michael Stuhlbarg are excellent.

The complaints are about accuracy and rhythm. Almost none of these conversations happened, several people involved objected publicly, and everyone speaks with the same relentless articulacy, so the arias occasionally sound like one writer rather than many characters. The repetition of the three act pattern is deliberate and still tiring by the last launch. It is enormous craft aimed at a man it never fully explains, and it knows that.