Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine movie review (2015)

Too bad the aesthetic purpose didn’t entail a personal-ethics component. The long-haired, unwashed, Bob Dylan-worshipping early Jobs may have looked like a groovy guy, but he behaved like a privileged ass. After lengthy denials that he fathered a child by girlfriend Chrisann Brennan were disproved by DNA tests, he begrudged having to pay $500 a month in child support when he was worth $200 million.

Gibney made his film without the cooperation of Jobs’ wife and their children or Apple, and thus his account doesn’t have either the authorized angle or wealth of insider-ish detail of Walter Isaacson’s capacious biography, which, among other differences, puts a greater emphasis on Jobs’ feelings as an adopted child. But the film and the book don’t reach dissimilar conclusions, and Gibney’s account has the cinematic virtue of including some very emotional interview material that couldn’t be equaled by the printed page. (We’ll soon be able to see how the written and documentary-film versions compare to the dramatized take offered in the Danny Boyle’s upcoming biopic, starring Michael Fassbender as Jobs.)

Naturally, Jobs’ life contained more than one act, and if Gibney gives relatively short shrift to the second, in which Jobs, forced out of Apple in 1985, co-founded NeXT and helped revolutionize computer animation in backing Pixar, the filmmaker aptly puts the emphasis on the third, when Jobs returns to the near-bankrupt Apple in 1997 and commences the era that will be bring the world the iPhone, iPod and iPod and transform the company into the world’s wealthiest.

It was in this era that Jobs sealed his place as the face of Apple as he made a habit of dazzling the press with dramatic announcements of new products that had often had the dazzling force of a new Beatles album’s unveiling. More than one interviewee comments that Jobs’ real genius was as a storyteller, one whose skills at shaping narratives (including foreseeing the next developments beyond the current one) included crafting a persona for himself as a beneficent technological wizard.

There was obviously some truth to that, but it also contained a large measure of the facile wish-fulfillment and eyewash common to all effective advertising. And behind the wizard’s screen, there was much that looks highly unflattering in Gibney’s telling, including Apple’s exploitation of low-paid Chinese workers, the off-shoring of company assets to avoid U.S. taxes, and the backdating of stock transactions, a sleazy episode in which one of Jobs’ most valuable lieutenants was thrown under the bus to save him.