For those who subscribe to the generally held view that the late co-founder of Apple was both an iconic visionary and a monster with a silicon chip where his heart should be, rest assured that writer Aaron Sorkin, director Danny Boyle and star Michael Fassbender have given their subject the brilliant, maddening, ingeniously designed and monstrously self-aggrandizing movie he deserves. Blowing away traditional storytelling conventions with the same withering contempt that seems to motivate its characters? every interaction, ? Steve Jobs? is a bravura backstage farce, a wildly creative fantasia in three acts in which every scene plays out as a real-time volley of insults and ideas ? insisting, with sometimes gratingly repetitive sound and fury, that Jobs? gift for innovation was perhaps inextricable from his capacity for cruelty. Straining like mad to be the ?Citizen Kane? (or at least the ?Birdman?) of larger-than-life techno-prophet biopics, this is a film of brash, swaggering artifice and monumental ego, a terrific actors? showcase and an incorrigibly entertaining ride that looks set to be one of the fall?s early must-see attractions.
