“Steve Jobs” is barely in theaters and already enraged fact checkers are out in full force.
“Maybe they should have called it ‘iLied,’” Kyle Smith of the New York Post mocked. And in the pages of the New York Times, Joe Nocera had quite a few complaints, including that the movie “uses none of (Jobs’) oft-repeated phrases, like ‘really, really neat’ when he liked something, or ‘bozo’ for people he didn’t think measured up.”
Maybe that’s why Oscar winner Aaron Sorkin has dutifully, repeatedly described the movie, which was directed by Danny Boyle, as “impressionistic.” “It’s really the difference between a photograph and a painting,” he explained to Wired.
The one word he won’t use to describe “Steve Jobs” is “biopic” - the tired Oscar-bait genre that follows a cradle-to-grave narrative of some luminary, punctuated by formative milestones and culminating in meaningful catharsis. You can see why the king of pithy dialogue and walk-and-talks, who brought us “The Social Network” and “The West Wing,” would want to distance himself from that category (although maybe not the Oscar part).
“Steve Jobs” doesn’t portray the Apple co-founder’s childhood, nor does it show the man on his deathbed. Instead, it focuses on Jobs on three different days as he prepares for the product launches of the Macintosh, in 1984, the NeXT CUBE, in 1988, and the iMac, in 1998.
We never see the actual launches - only the chaos leading up to them. And during each of these days, Jobs (played by Michael Fassbender) encounters the same parade of people: his right-hand woman Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet); his longtime friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen); one-time Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels); Macintosh software designer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg); and, most memorably, Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), who is the mother of Lisa (portrayed by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine at different ages) - a daughter that Jobs insists, at first, isn’t his.
Is it likely that Chrisann would choose the day of the Macintosh launch to visit Jobs and demand money? Of course not. Which also explains why Sorkin has been so emphatic about how to categorize the film. “This movie is not a biopic,” he told Trevor Noah when visiting “The Daily Show.”
So what is a biopic? We know it when we see it: “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Raging Bull” and “The Elephant Man.” More recently, “Ray,” “Walk the Line,” “The Imitation Game,” “A Beautiful Mind” and so many others have joined the movement. Like “Steve Jobs,” every one of these movies took liberties with the facts. And, like “Steve Jobs,” they’re all portraits of a person in cinematic form.
So maybe “Steve Jobs” is a biopic after all. And yet, Sorkin has a point. The movie stands apart.
Unlike in 2013’s “Jobs,” starring Ashton Kutcher, no great effort was expended to make Fassbender look like the man he’s portraying. The actor didn’t gain or lose weight the way Robert De Niro did for “Raging Bull” or Ben Kingsley did for “Gandhi.” He just donned jeans, a black turtleneck and those familiar circular-rimmed glasses. The fact that “Steve Jobs” eschews complete aesthetic veracity is just one instance of a recurring theme: The movie is about conveying the essence of its subject. Or, as the always endearing Wozkniak explained to Bloomberg, “The movie is not about reality. The movie is about personalities.”
And how does it fare? Walter Isaacson, who wrote the definitive, exhaustive and authorized biography of Jobs, told Fortune, “I think the movie is brilliantly written by Aaron Sorkin and powerfully acted, adding up to a memorable impressionistic work that breaks from the confines of being a literal biopic.”
Meanwhile, Wozniak told Bloomberg that he’s seen the movie three times.
“Everything in the movie didn’t happen, but they’re based on things that did happen,” he explained. And Wozniak recognized the person on screen.
“I saw the Steve Jobs I love in a lot of scenes and I saw the Steve Jobs (who is) sometimes not caring what other people think,” Wozniak said. “They were very realistic.”
It’s hard to imagine Wozniak - huggable guy that he is - trash-talking the movie. But other tidbits he mentioned during the interview offer a window on Sorkin’s process. Wozniak and Sorkin met up on multiple occasions and talked for hours. Sorkin did the same with Hoffman, Sculley, the entrepreneur’s daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs and dozens of others. So the writer’s research was just as painstaking as someone writing a straightforward biopic built on carefully collected details. But instead of digging for actual events, Sorkin focused on emotions.
And that’s an important distinction. Almost every biopic is a compilation of turning points. Alan Turing’s childhood crush dies unexpectedly in “The Imitation Game” and Chris Kyle’s father explains the difference between sheep, wolves and sheepdogs in “American Sniper”; in “Pawn Sacrifice,” Bobby Fischer’s mother encourages her son’s paranoia.
These moments seek to explain and distill their subjects. No wonder Turing cared so much about his machine, we think. He named it after his lost love.
Of course, in reality, Turing didn’t. But inserting certain events into the narrative transforms something uncontainable - a human being - into an entity that’s easier to make sense of.
Sorkin doesn’t do that. Instead, he celebrates the messiness of his subject using interactions with other people in place of milestones. One moment he’s gentle and caring while the next he’s exuding a grotesque level of hubris, and there’s not always a good explanation for his behavior. In fact, in one of the movie’s most poignant moments, Lisa asks her dad why he lied to her when she was a child and told her the Apple Lisa computer wasn’t named for her. Even he can’t understand his motivations. “I don’t know,” he tells her simply.
You might liken Sorkin’s approach to Pablo Picasso’s portraits of Marie-Therese Walter. The painter was obviously capable of recreating his mistress’s likeness perfectly, but, using bright colors and a cubist approach, mimicry wasn’t his aim. He wanted to capture something more elusive. Does that make his paintings less than portraiture?
“We all know that art is not truth,” the painter said once. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
“Steve Jobs” isn’t truth. It’s art. Even Wozniak understands that.
“I never wanted to look at the script after he wrote it,” he told Bloomberg. “It’s his art.”
Sorkin’s creative license will cause outrage. But that doesn’t mean he should distance himself from the biopic genre. If anything, he should delight in turning a musty rubric into something unpredictable. “Steve Jobs” is the most original example of the form in years.
