Steve Jobs, the punchy and revealing new biopic written by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and directed by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), opens with a startling piece of black-and-white documentary footage from the late ‘60s: Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is describing with extraordinary exactitude what the home-computer revolution will one day look like. The relevance of the clip is all too obvious, but it also plays as a sly dig: if Clarke could pinpoint the future this precisely nearly half a century ago, the implication is that Steve Jobs didn’t really create that future – he just filled it in.  Steve Jobs didn’t really create that future – he just filled it in  As a movie, Steve Jobs is an exciting piece of iconoclasm: a talky, charged thriller for the brain that offers an intimate interpretation of who Jobs really was, even as it shrewdly undercuts many of the high-tech-saviour claims that have been made for him, especially since his death in 2011. Michael Fassbender, who plays Jobs, doesn’t look especially like him, but with tense lips and eyes like heat-seeking missiles, he acts with a tightly wound, domineering bravura that never allows us to forget what a brilliant figure Jobs was, even as his main activity seems to be terrorizing everyone around him.  The movie unfolds with the rat-a-tat-tat combative dialogue that, at this point, can only be called Sorkinese: the sound of people doing everything in their power, line by line, to outdo each other. In an age where great conversation in movies – and maybe in life – seems to be slowly fading, there’s something seismic about the dialogue in Steve Jobs. It stimulates your mind, as if Sorkin were saying, “I dare you to keep up with these perceptions.” No wonder Sorkin is drawn to figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Jobs, people whose minds move at the speed of computers.  By now, we’ve had enough straight-up chronicles of Jobs (the 2011 Walter Isaacson biography, the unfairly bashed 2013 biopic starring Ashton Kutcher, the recent Alex Gibney documentary), so Sorkin opts for a heightened, nearly theatrical approach, isolating a trio of key moments from Jobs’ life. The film has three sections, each of which takes place backstage prior to an iconic product launch – first the Macintosh in 1984; then the failed NeXT computer in 1998; and, finally, the iMac in 1998.  Sorkinese is the sound of people doing everything in their power, line by line to outdo each other  The structure sounds limiting, and there’s a certain rigid, stagebound quality to it, which is why the film lacks the flow of The Social Network (Sorkin’s finest hour). Yet if the new movie is a bit of a conceit – all talk and no action – the talk is rarely less than electrifying. Sorkin assumes that the audience is familiar with the outline of Jobs’ life and career, which he fills in with flashbacks and digressions; by the end, you feel you’ve received not the whole biography but the distilled essence of it. Sorkin wants to unmask the mystique of the man – to show that the Jobs we think we know was, to a degree, a creation of smoke and mirrors.  The first episode takes off from Jobs’ pathological need to have the Macintosh say “Hello” at the start of his presentation, even though the computer keeps crashing. Attended by his head of marketing (Kate Winslet), whose main role is to act as a sponge to soak up his abusive energy, Jobs won’t take no for an answer. We’re cued to see that his marketing instincts are genius, yet his need to dictate everything that happens turns darker when his former college girlfriend (Sarah Snook) arrives, along with their five-year-old daughter, Lisa (Makenzie Moss), who Jobs continues to claim isn’t his, even though DNA tests indicate otherwise.  As the debate rages, we realise that Jobs is a control freak operating on a nearly metaphysical level of control. It’s not just that he doesn’t want this child – it’s that by repeating his denials, he believes he can make them a reality. So complete is his identification with the perfection of technology that he allows for nothing unplanned. That said, he gets lured into a tender moment when he watches Lisa draw something on the Macintosh. That’s the beauty of his new machine: it can connect them.  Jobs is a control freak operating on a nearly metaphysical level of control  The other two segments also dramatise the sins of Steve Jobs – but here, too, they’re not just flaws of ego or tyrannical behaviour so much as they are sins of perception. Four years later, after the launch – and commercial failure – of the Macintosh, Jobs has left Apple and started NeXT, a company whose signature product is a black cube that looks designed enough to be in an art museum. But to what end? Sorkin uses this episode to go back to the failure of the Macintosh, and what it said about Jobs: that he was a bad businessman, indifferent to the fact that the Apple 2 – which he’d lost all interest in – was making 70% of the company’s revenue.  The movie shows us his clash with John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the CEO of Apple, who was right about wanting to kill the Mac. And here, once again, we see Jobs’ need to shape reality, as he used that failure to orchestrate a myth – that he was unfairly fired by corporate droids who lacked imagination. The big showdown between Jobs and Sculley, who has come backstage to make amends, is a thrilling clash of creativity and commerce, with Daniels pushing Sculley’s ire to a bold pitch of intensity. The NeXT computer already has the ring of failure, but the Sorkin twist is that Jobs knows that: it’s all part of his Machiavellian plan to return to Apple.  Jobs’ ultimate clash, in the final episode, is with Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), the sheepish, bearded proto-computer geek who was his partner in creating Apple. Rogen makes Woz a deeply likable mensch, and we can see that Jobs still has affection for him, but what he refuses to do – ever – is give him true credit for what he did. Which was basically to invent the technical prototype for Steve Jobs’ vision. And so this isn’t just about Jobs not being a “good guy.” It’s about how he takes his need to squash everyone else and uses it to turn himself into the lone messiah of the computer revolution.  As Jobs gets ready to launch the iMac, he already knows it’s going to be a game-changer: in 1998, with the rise of the internet, the world is finally wired for his dream of computer bliss. And Lisa, now 19, stands by his side. Sorkin makes the possibly sentimental point that Jobs succeeded in his visionary goals only after he let in the light from the daughter he had denied. Maybe so. But the film’s real upshot is far more scalding. It’s that the computer revolution would have happened with or without Steve Jobs. He’s simply the one who made it beautiful – and, just as important, convinced all of us to worship him for it.  If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
Michael Fassbender stars in the new biopic of the tech icon. Does it present him as a genius – or a monster? Owen Gleiberman finds out.