"The very nature of people is something to be overcome," Steve Jobs says in Steve Jobs. Well, not the real Steve Jobs—this Steve Jobs is played by Michael Fassbender, doing his best to rock Jobs' black turtlenecks and dad jeans while being an asshole to everyone he meets.
Yet, more than anything—more than Apple computers, more than iPhones, more than how history actually played out—Steve Jobs is concerned with human nature. Jobs' nature, most notably, but also the lives and needs and sadnesses of those in his orbit: There's Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Jobs' marketing expert; John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), Apple's one-time CEO; Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), one of the developers of the Macintosh; and Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), the genius behind the Apple I and the Apple II. In Steve Jobs, all those accomplishments are secondary to the fact that these people are verbal and emotional punching bags for Jobs, who churns through them with sociopathic coldness. At one point, Sculley gives Jobs some advice: "Don't play stupid. You can't pull it off." To his credit, Jobs never seems stupid; to his discredit, he does seem vindictive, petty, and desperate to make his mark on the world.
