London Film Festival: Steve Jobs

There are few writers operating in mainstream media today who exhibit the kind of auteurial control we see from Aaron Sorkin. His screenplay for Steve Jobs – full of the breakneck dialogue and quick-witted humour that characterises his work – even manages to overpower the trademark panache of visually-inventive director Danny Boyle. If the film is a symphony then Sorkin is its conductor, and he’s fortunate to have Michael Fassbender in first chair, giving a remarkable performance as the fabled Apple co-founder.

Myth-making is the film’s raison d'être. This is not a traditional biopic, but rather a character study meticulously constructed to reflect both incredible vision and inescapable faults. Separated into three forty-minute sections, each one chronicles a fictionalised version of the minutes immediately before a big product launch: the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT in 1988, and the iMac in 1998.

Accused by some of being a character-assassination, this is much more than that: a nuanced portrait of an undoubtedly great man through several complicated and sometimes fraught relationships. At centre stage stands Fassbender, giving a performance of such subtlety, ease and confidence that you almost can’t remember what Jobs actually looked like.

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Notes from the Twitteratti:

#SteveJobs: Boyle, Sorkin, Fassbender, Winslet. A-list talent combine to make an a-list movie. Loved it. #LFF

— Tom Grater (@tomsmovies) October 18, 2015

Whenever I watch an Aaron Sorkin film, I leave the cinema wanting to speak really fast and throw out cutting remarks #SteveJobs #LFF

— Sara Hemrajani (@s_hemmy) October 18, 2015

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