In Steve Jobs, Sorkin takes interactions and confrontations that occurred at different points in Jobs’s life, or not at all, and reimagines them as having taken place backstage in the minutes immediately before Jobs unveiled one of three new products — Apple’s Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT Computer in 1988, and the original Bondi blue iMac G3 in 1998. (Each sequence gets its own distinct look: grainy/nostalgic 16-millimeter for the Mac, sumptuous 35 for the NeXT, warts-and-all digital for the iMac.) The film’s more-than-a-little-bit cockamamy sub-premise is that on each of these crucially important days, Jobs also found himself scheduled for back-to-back come-to-Jesus meetings with people he’d wronged on his way to the top, including Lisa and her mother, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston); Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, putting deepening wrinkles of hurt in his Fozzie Bear rumble); and the company’s third CEO, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels, perfectly wry and wounded).
Occasionally, flashbacks peek into other chapters — Jobs and Wozniak in the Los Altos garage, arguing over whether a computer should be like a painting, and the Cupertino boardroom showdown between Sculley and Jobs that preceded Jobs’s departure from the company in 1985. But huge pieces of Jobs’s life and career fall outside the frame: Windows, Laurene Powell, Buddhism, the iPhone, Feist, cancer, the Foxconn suicide nets, and the part of the Isaacson book where Mac software architect Andy Hertzfeld tries to cheer up the ousted Jobs by bringing him a copy of Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque and Jobs dismisses “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” as “too disco,” proving once and for all that whatever his other sins, Steve was also guilty of underrating Sly and Robbie. We don’t get a cinematic rendering of the telling black-comic moment in the Isaacson book when Jobs, fighting pneumonia in a liver-transplant ward in Memphis, Tennessee, stirs from the depths of sedation to rip an oxygen mask off his face and tell the pulmonologist he won’t wear it because it’s badly designed — a moment made for the parallel world where the Coen brothers got to this story first. Nor does Sorkin’s Jobs ever come near the self-awareness the actual Jobs displayed in admitting to Isaacson, toward the end of his life, that he never liked putting on/off switches on Apple products because he wants to believe our consciousness survives after we die.
Jobs’s fear that death might indeed be the end has given us a world of ever-present devices that are sometimes sleeping, but always on; in a sense it’s also given us a world where we, too, are sometimes sleeping but always on. It’s been suggested that by hooking us on closed-system technologies designed to steer us toward specifically and idiosyncratically Jobsian approaches to work and creation and human interaction, Jobs took his wound and inflicted it on all of us. This is the most provocative idea in Alex Gibney’s recent, damning documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, even if Gibney, bound by the constraints of nonfiction, can’t quite say it out loud. It also floats through the background of Sorkin’s screenplay, although technology itself is as tangential to this story as the fortunes of the mighty Bengals of Cincinnati were to the lives of the people on Sports Night. It’s pretty clear Sorkin views each of the products that Jobs unveils as a newer, neater bottle for the same old snake oil. The most symbolically significant computer in the film is the NeXT system from ’88, a beautifully designed black cube that doesn’t actually have an operating system yet, because Jobs is waiting to build one he can barter to Apple as a get-out-of-exile-free card.