In reimagining Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography for the screen, director Danny Boyle (2013's "Trance") and writer Aaron Sorkin (2011's "Moneyball") have been adamant "Steve Jobs" is no conventional biopic. Instead, they have sought to capture the essence of their savvy if temperamental human subject through the microcosmic lens of three of the Apple founder's product launches: the original Macintosh PC in 1984, the NeXT workstation computer in 1988, and the iMac in 1998. This storytelling conceit is structurally shrewd and compact, but also creatively contrived, encapsulating Jobs—his demanding ambition, his professional and interpersonal conflicts, his ultimate redemption—into a trio of extended snapshots, each one set on a single day in his life.
A chamber piece driven by Sorkin's fastidious, rat-a-tat dialogue, "Steve Jobs" demands attention if not one's full emotional understanding of the title character. He is portrayed as a forward-thinking visionary, a man of ideas driven by a specific cadence and ego that helped to make him the success he became. His colleagues—even those who stick by him through the years, like Head of Marketing Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) and Apple co-founder and engineer Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen)—seem to agree with the unflattering reputation which precedes him. Granted, Jobs publicly denied paternity of daughter Lisa (played at varying ages by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine) in a Time Magazine article, but as the film sees things, he remained a presence in her life and did financially support her and her mother, ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), even as the latter clearly continued taking advantage of him. Jobs' semi-vilification throughout the bulk of the picture doesn't seamlessly match with his actions onscreen, while the pat, tidy atonement he receives during the third act lays on the maudlin manipulation to an overblown degree.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
