Jobs shrugs off worldly concerns with gnomic pronouncements like, “The very nature of people is something to be overcome,” and, “God sent his only son on a suicide mission, but we like him anyway, because he made trees.” Cut to a wave sweeping through the auditorium — the cult of Steve, already a fait accompli. Not for the last time, Boyle emphasizes the disconnect between the public and private Jobs by shooting Fassbender in a makeup mirror, framed so that his image seems to linger there for a split second after he’s gotten up and moved. By the time we get to 1988, the mirror-Jobs has taken over, booking Symphony Hall in San Francisco for an elegantly micromanaged luncheon in honor of a Trojan-horse computer that Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy would later call “the first yuppie workstation.” It’s the most classically cinematic part of the movie — in his ostentatiously post-nerdy power suit, Fassbender looks like Michael Corleone and acts like Fredo pretending to be Sonny, shooing away the daughter he still can’t bring himself to parent and then hypocritically bellowing, “That’s what men do!” at Sculley moments later. The scene cuts back and forth between their Symphony Hall standoff and the meeting that led to Jobs quitting Apple in 1985; it’s Sorkin cross-fading two streams of Sorkin-talk, as in the dueling-depositions sequence from The Social Network, only here it’s harder to follow which Jobs is yelling what at which Sculley.
A genericized electronic version of “Where the Streets Have No Name” by future iTunes shills U2 greets Jobs’s arrival onstage, then carries us off to the late ’90s, where Wozniak and Hertzfeld pop up again, like aggrieved ghosts of Christmases past. Then Jobs and 19-year-old Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine) have it out in front of massive black-and-white portraits of the pantheonic culture heroes who starred in Apple’s “Think different” campaign. A key shot encourages us to think of Lisa as Bob Dylan (to Jobs’s Mr. Jones, I guess), and she gets what feels like the last word: “Think is a verb, making differently an adverb.” It should be a mic drop, but of course it isn’t. There’s still time for Jobs to chase her down and tell her what we want to hear — that he’s his own shittiest product, an emotional Newton, a very good wizard and a very not-great man. Oh, and — 2000s spoiler alert — he promises to make her something to replace that ugly cassette Walkman she’s still carrying around. The Isaacson book suggests that the relationship Jobs and Lisa struck up as she got older was fragile, and that they’d grown apart again before Jobs got sick; the movie grants him absolution by leaving off where it does. Except it’s more than absolution — in the last scene, brimming with strobe-lit rapture playing out on the principal actors’ faces and a stormingly emotive Maccabees song I assume is titled “They Called Us After Coldplay Said No,” it’s strongly implied that in finally accepting dadhood, Jobs also attained godhood.
He’s rendered remote and holographic, a benevolent presence you can see but not touch. I thought of the end of Wild Palms, when Robert Loggia catches a computer virus while attempting to upload himself to the Cloud and boils away into loose pixels while singing “Hello, I Must Be Going,” and of the parts of Cats when the felines sing one of their kind up to the Heaviside layer, but your user experience may vary. Obviously, ending a Steve Jobs movie is no easy task; if I recall correctly, the Kutcher version basically leapfrogs over years of untidy history to Think different, then leaves off so abruptly that it might as well have cut to a hastily scrawled title card reading “NOTE: STEVE JOBS DIED ON THE WAY BACK TO HIS HOME PLANET.” Sorkin and Boyle’s movie ends more gracefully, but its uplift comes more or less out of nowhere, and unless you’ve been holding out for permission to keep thinking of Jobs as a hero, it might leave you feeling cheated. I like the rest of Steve Jobs enough to want to pretend they did it that way on purpose.
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