So, someone asks, it’s just a black cube? “Yeah,” Jobs says. “But isn’t it the coolest black cube you’ve ever seen?” As in The Social Network, Sorkin’s disdain for the inherent arrogance of technological futurism as a character trait keeps him from thinking clearly or critically about the actual futures his characters think they’re inventing; that’s the bad news. The good news is that if you can ignore what it’s not doing, Steve Jobs creates a reality-distortion field as powerful and persuasive as the one its subject was famous for projecting. Sorkin’s dialogue is a helluva drug, and Boyle finds clever ways to bring life to an all-talk script without getting all Birdman about it. Whether you thought Jobs was the messiah of tech-gnosis or a sneering Bond villain in dad jeans, the movie’s carbonated crispness will still carry you out of the theater on an iCloud.
Thanks in part to the Sony hackers, we know that this movie and its cast took a while to come together. We know that it was almost a David Fincher film, with Christian Bale as Jobs, and that Leonardo DiCaprio and (fascinatingly) Tom Cruise were both considered for the lead after Bale dropped out, and that when Michael Fassbender was floated as an alternative, Sorkin responded with Jobsian tact by asking who the fuck this “Michael Fassbender” person was. All of this now seems like a long journey to a retrospectively obvious destination. Fassbender looks enough like Jobs that it’s not distracting, and he finds a voice for the character — thin, somewhat unpleasant, with a rueful hitch that’ll remind Sorkheads of Bradley Whitford’s Josh Lyman and a pipsqueak lilt that bugged me until I realized I was hearing Alex P. Keaton in it — that dissolves whatever issues of verisimilitude remain. His Jobs always sounds like he’s just finished a temper tantrum, except when he’s winding up to throw another one. Fassbender actually does less with his body than Ashton Kutcher did in Joshua Michael Stern’s studiously misbegotten Jobs, from 2013, but I’d trade all of Kutcher’s carefully observed gangling for the split-second moment here when Lisa throws her arms around Steve and whispers “I want to live with you” and Fassbender’s Jobs reacts as a traffic light might. And, I mean, of course the perfect actor for the Jobs part turned out to be the guy who plays Magneto — the haughtiest and most regally bored mutant in Marvel’s menagerie, a super-antihero whose key traits include childhood trauma, a homicidal impatience with humanity’s sluggish evolution, and a will that can literally bend steel.
He’s at his most obviously supervillainous in the first act, robotically responding “Apple donates millions of dollars’ worth of computers to underfunded schools” when Waterston pleads with him to pay her more than $385 a month in child support now that he’s worth $441 million — and insisting, in front of his daughter, that the name of Apple’s “LISA” computer was merely an acronym for “Local Integrated System Architecture.” Meanwhile, Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg, lovely and understated as the avatar of every other poor bastard charged with telling Jobs “no”) and his team (a group of perfectly cast alternate-timeline Morks) struggle to debug the Mac prototype’s text-to-speech software after Jobs admonishes them, “Fuck you — we need it to say Hello.” In real life, the computer didn’t just talk — it told jokes about IBM, then introduced Jobs as “a man who’s been like a father to me,” a moment Sorkin weirdly leaves out.