Who better than Alex Gibney to profile Steve Jobs? Well, probably plenty of directors, but still: Gibney has a reputation as an incisive, no-nonsense documentarian with a keen mind for layered investigation and an impressive bullshit detector. He’s also old hat at dissolving the facade of celebrity—as in his 2013 picture, The Armstrong Lie—and at yanking corruption and wrongdoing into the daylight, as in the Emmy nominated Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which arrived earlier this year. In both films, Gibney’s mission is laid out in the first few minutes: Expose the truth, disperse the lie and gently proceed without mercy.
So if anyone can parse the many faces of Jobs, late Allfather of modern technology and veteran scoundrel, Gibney’s near the top of the list. Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might be as close to a sure thing on paper as any documentary can be, but there’s a problem: Jobs, it turns out, is too much of a challenge even for Gibney to tackle. That’s a shock, but then, Jobs is basically an endless Russian nesting doll of ambition, fear, anxiety, malice, creativity, deceit, passion and, at the center of all that, heart. Based on the film’s lengthy running time, Gibney is aware that the task of turning a god mortal is not to be taken lightly, but Jobs meant so many different things to so many different people—plus an entire industry—that two hours feels inadequate.
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine opens with footage of consumers laying wreaths at Apple stores and sharing their video testimonials/eulogies on the web. The images, taken at once, are staggering: How could so many people experience such real grief at the death of a man they never met? Incredibly, though, Gibney’s starting point is also his first stumbling block. Is it worth mulling over the fanatical devotion Apple loyalists feel toward their iStuff? Absolutely, particularly as Gibney takes us down the corporate rabbit hole and reveals that Apple isn’t the company we all think it is, or want it to be. There’s a seductive quality to the idea that among tech giants, Apple is fighting the good fight by making gadgets that enhance us, let us express ourselves, let us connect with one another and make the world a smaller, better place.
It’s a lie, of course, but you’d have to crawl stroke through Kool-Aid daily not to realize it. After presenting his thesis, Gibney wanders all the way back to the 1970s, when Jobs and Steve Wozniak were cooking up blue boxes—nifty gizmos that let people make free long distance phone calls—and birthing the first Apple computer. We know where the movie is going to take us from here: All the way up to where we began. This makes sense inasmuch that if you want to understand Jobs’ cult of personality, you need to understand Jobs himself, but as Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine pores over history, it becomes an entirely different film than the one with which Gibney commences. He buries the lede.