THE VIEWING GUIDE

FROM MARCH 7 / CERT. 15

Danny Boyle’s latest ifilm Steve Jobs provides the Apple for our beady, beady eyes.

DAVID FINCHER jumped ship; it looked worryingly similar to a certain Ashton Kutcher film; Michael Fassbender didn’t much resemble the man he was playing. Yet anyone who skipped Danny Boyle’s examination of Apple’s great visionary because of those early fears missed a kinetic, operatic tale about an iconoclast who, for all his flaws, really did put “a dent in the universe”.

Covering just 14 years in three acts, Steve Jobs isn’t a conventional biopic. Yet Boyle brings Sorkin’s script to life with great imagination, while there are outstanding performances from Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Seth Rogen. Fassbender, in particular, is commanding at all times, whether pacing around a stage, fretting about his next big product launch, or dealing with more intimate dramas in a greenroom. Whether you’re a tech junkie or not, the drama here is fantastically entertaining, both a paean to a genius and a castigation of what one of Jobs’ long-suffering colleagues called an “assaholic”.

“Historians tell you what happened, dramatists tell you what it felt like,” says Boyle in the extras. “The only thing that really happened is they couldn’t get the computer to say, ‘Hello,’” Sorkin admits in his commentary with editor Elliot Graham, which is less captivating than the one in which Boyle flies solo. All three, plus the cast, are on hand for 45-minute ‘making of’ Inside Jobs, and while deleted scenes mentioned by Boyle are missing, the background detail here is plentiful.

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