A superhero story like no other

Originally published inLGBT Weekly

Ryan Reynolds and Brianna Hildebrand in Deadpool

One of the problems with the takeover of popular culture by Marvel and DC superheroes is how seriously the stories take themselves, how easy the morality is and how family-friendly everything is. Monster-budget films like The Avengers and the upcoming Batman vs Superman, or network dramas like The Flash and Agents of SHIELD, aim to reach the broadest audience possible, which means no swearing, little irony and barely a hint of sex. (The Netflix shows Daredevil and Jessica Jones are the exception, as they are niche shows.) Then there’s Deadpool, the raunchy, hyper and hilariously violent, anti-hero’s tale that exploded a dozen box office records last week. Based on one of the edgiest characters in the Marvel X-Men universe, the film both panders to the basest sensibilities of the young men who make up the lion’s share of comic book fans and mercilessly mocks superhero story conventions.

The film begins with the wise-cracking, red-hooded super soldier laying waste to heavily armed bad guys on a highway overpass. The first two acts use this sequence to set up flashbacks explaining how Deadpool got to this moment. A few years before, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), a very handsome and freakishly competent mercenary, goes around shooting and socking random jerks, for or not for payment. He has a truer moral compass than he claims, repeatedly saying he’s not a hero. One day, he meets a similarly witty and confident regular at his local bar for ne’er-do-wells, a prostitute named Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). A few minutes after they get engaged, he discovers he has advanced cancer (a weird tone shift for the film that until then is pretty light, even in its violence).

Shortly thereafter, a mysterious man in a suit (Hugh Scott) tells Wade his organization can cure and make him superhuman. At first Wade refuses, but then, out of guilt for possibly leaving Vanessa alone, he agrees and sneaks off in the middle of night. It turns out that this organization actually creates mutant slaves for especially evil criminals, and its chief scientist Ajax (Ed Skrein), a sociopath without the ability to feel pain, delights in torturing his patients. Ajax says it’s the only way to activate their latent powers. Eventually, Wade’s powers are activated, and he escapes. But while these powers give him the ability to heal from anything – he can even grow back an amputated hand – they rather horribly disfigure his skin and face: “Whatever they did to me made me totally indestructible… and completely unf@#*able.” Thinking that Vanessa will never want to see him again, Wade dons the moniker Deadpool and lays waste to the underworld looking for Ajax in order to force him to fix what he’s done.

Throughout the film, Wade makes filthy, twisted and obscure jokes; they happen so quickly and so often, I’m looking forward to the DVD so I can catch them all. Very few of them are printable, and I wouldn’t want to ruin the fun of you hearing them fresh. Wade also repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, commenting on the film’s plot directly to the audience, who no one else in the film understands is watching. This works better in the comics, where no characters in the Marvel Universe do this, but it still sets up good jokes and brings the audience into the action. Reynolds, who is an exceptionally winning and charismatic comedian, is as perfectly cast as Deadpool as anyone has been cast as a superhero (more so than Patrick Stewart as Professor X). After being at the center of one of the worst superhero bombs (Green Lantern), Deadpool redeems Reynolds as major star who can carry a franchise.

The other, less visible, winner is Tim Miller, the first-time director who presided over Reynold’s epic performance and Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s witty, giddy script.

Deadpool

Directed by Tim Miller

Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein

Rated R

Powered by WPeMatico

|       

2016 Gold Teddy Awards for Most Excellence in Music

It’s that time of year again: late mid-February, about six week after most professionals have published their Best of [insert year] lists and I finally get around to doing my annual music awards.

I spent a lot of time alone this year, because I became single and, for the first time in my life, moved into my own apartment, sans roommate. A bunch of stuff I liked, or was drawn to, drew me in because I was feeling lonely — or giddy with independence. Or it just had a good beat and I could dance to it.

This year, I’ve made a playlist on Spotify, so you can listen along to the full list of songs I loved last year, not just the winners of the weird categories I made up.

Most Excellence in Dadaism

It’s a tie!

Drake, “Hotline Bling.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxpDa-c-4Mc[/embedyt]

No one can deny that Drake’s mega hit is the year’s ear worm of doom, and it’s an awesome one, only partly because the video was instantly iconic in mixing high art light sculpture with hip hop tropes and a heavy dose of WTF dancing. But the lyrics and structure sound like e. e. cummings got dissed by a phone sex operator and then smoked a really huge bowl. Hilarious, awesome.

Weezer, “Thank God for Girls.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJMruBJfhNM[/embedyt]

I fell in love with Weezer 20 years ago, and have remained an apologist after they became uncool, because of the Blue Album‘s perfect blend of polished grunge and ironic, witty, and delightfully odd lyrics. (The videos were icing.) “Thank God for Girls” is as a batshit crazy as “Pork and Beans” and as catchy as “Beverly Hills.” It’s a underheard song, and delightful in its retro, childlike heterosexuality.

Most Excellence in Spine-Chilling Nostalgic Ennui

It’s a tie!

Jeffrey Foucault, “Des Moines.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w46hwtgdJq8[/embedyt]

Jeffrey Foucault (pronounced incorrectly as Foh-calt) is a hotter, deeper, bluesier Bill Morrissey, and this could be his best song, a remembrance of a gig and a friendship in Iowa. When he sings at the crescendo, “We walked in like a rock and roll band,” I fell in love with the reflexive, probably revisionist, joy.

“Painting” from Fortress of Solitude.[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyheDip0hW8[/embedyt]

In order to transition several years of the 1970s in Fortress of Solitude, Abraham Ebdus (Ken Barnet) sings about all of the things that happened, major historical and emotional events, and how he ignored them while he painted. There’s subsumed anger and grief, and I wept in the theater the first time I heard it.

Most Excellence in Coincidence

Adam Lambert, “Ghost Town.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix8ocFEMa1o[/embedyt]

Adam Lambert’s version came out first, and it’s gorgeous, weird, innovative, and I found it thrilling. I’m a huge Lambert fan and I feel I’m sometimes an apologist for his super poppy corporate stuff. But this is nothing anyone should apologize for. Unless you’re apologizing for not liking it.

Madonna, “Ghost Town.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgDxv0Qg_Rg[/embedyt]

Madonna’s isn’t as great, but it’s a good catchy ballad. True, it’s got that kind of guarded metaphor-as-emotion thing that a lot of her slow stuff suffers from, unlike “HeartBreakCity,” which is raw. But I was going through a terrible time when it came out, and it got under my skin. And Rebel Heart is easily her best album since Confessions on the Dance Floor or, less easily but arguably, since Music.

Most Excellence in Emotional Wreckage.

Adele, “Hello.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQHsXMglC9A[/embedyt]

Yeah. The day it was released, I had an uncontrollable urge to revisit every one of my previous relationships. Now that it’s become so embedded in the culture and parodied relentlessly, it has less power, but that weekend was tough.

Most Excellence in Barnstorming Pop.

Demi Lovato, “Cool for the Summer.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il9nqWw9W3Y[/embedyt]

I love a good call for sexual adventure, even if it’s paint-by-nunbers corporate pop sung by a Disney vet. Because sometimes, it’s this damn thrilling.

Most Excellence in Singles: My Top 5 (or, rather, 6)

Kendrick Lamar, “King Kunta.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRK7PVJFbS8[/embedyt]

I must admit, I didn’t quite know for some time what this song was about other than swag and ego, and since Kendrick Lamar is lyricist of subtlety and depth I doubt that swag and ego is what it’s actually about. So, I Googled. Oh, it is about swag and ego, but the reference to Kunte Kinte to express empowerment, struggle, and growth makes it a bit subtler, and perhaps ironic, than, say, Kanye West’s “Power.” Also, King Kunta is funky as hell, with a rhythm, both in Lamar’s usual flow and in the bass line, that is irresistible as hell.

Alabama Shakes, “Gimme All Your Love.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sNNTpORtDQ[/embedyt]

This is an epic love song that actually sounds like being in love, that painful, hungry kind if love. It’s astonishing.

Shamir, “On the Regular” and “Make a Scene.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp9GgdCgMXk[/embedyt]
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq4DumzwmlY[/embedyt]

Shamir’s was the best live show I saw in 2015, and not just because it was surprising that this 21-year-old super-gay rapper on a promo tour could control a room like he Springsteen. Okay, that was a lot of it. But the songs are thrilling, too, with the double whammy of these two singles. The lyrics are quite insightful for a teenager, but they’re also funny as hell. And gay. Gayyyy.

Courtney Barnett, “Elevator Operator.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sZxnyn6mRY[/embedyt]

This rollicking song is a short story about a young man named Oliver Paul who decides to play hooky from his job one morning. When he takes an elevator to the roof of a tall building with a rich old lady, she thinks he’s planning to commit suicide. Oh, no:

He said “I think you’re projecting the way that you’re feeling
I’m not suicidal, just idling insignificantly
I come up here for perception and clarity
I like to imagine I’m playing SimCity
All the people look like ants from up here
And the wind’s the only traffic you can hear

Courtney Barnett is some weird Aussie rock version of Raymond Carver.

Jamie xx, “Loud Places.”[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP9luRtEqjc[/embedyt]

This is singer-songwriter electronica at its best. It’s just perfectly beautiful, musically complex, and epic. A true work of art.

Most Excellence in Albums: My Top 5

Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-nr1nNC3ds[/embedyt]

I already said it: Aussie rocker Raymond Carver. She’s the heir to Liz Phair, Bruce Springsteen, and, hell, Peter Carey. I love the hell out of this revelatory album.

Chris Stapleton, Traveller.[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqUx-WDL-Pc[/embedyt]
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM_Xh5xPnmo[/embedyt]

Aside from being sex on a stick, Chris Stapleton itelegraphs authenticity, as if he’s the love child of Johnny Cash and, well, Jeffrey Foucault. Authenticity as marketing tool is sort of the definition of inauthentic (Bernie Sanders, cough) but sometimes it’s compelling. Especially when it sounds like a country-rock god singing about stuff that is not trucks, guns, hometowns, or beer.

Ryan Adams, 1989.[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i65kX8cnswg[/embedyt]
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSyus3HlQPI[/embedyt]

Taylor Swift’s 1989 is a damn fine pop album, but as reinterpreted by Ryan Adams, the songs develop a depth of emotion that her producers — Max Martin, et al. — made sure they couldn’t have, since depth of emotion doesn’t quite work on Top 40 stations, unless it’s Adele. His versions are so smart, gorgeous, and serious, I grew even more impressed by Swift’s lyrics. And then she did acoustic versions of the songs, and, well, she should do that more often.

Liane La Havas, Blood.[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNLkD8QEnAM[/embedyt]
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFic-xaLsPs[/embedyt]

I loved Lianne’s first album, which is beautiful, if quiet. But Blood is not quiet at all; it’s sexy and fun and beautiful and it rocks and, hey, the President loves it, too. Every song is great. Period.

Carly Rae Jepson, Emotion.[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeccAtqd5K8[/embedyt]
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlFMVzo9zuE[/embedyt]

This is my second favorite Taylor Swift album of the year, after Ryan Adams’s. Weirdly under-appreciated by radio, it’s an album of masterful pop songs that sit firmly in Swift’s genre but seem, somehow, better. Maybe it’s because Swift’s personality is so huge that she overshadows the music. Anyway, Jepson doesn’t have that celebrity profile, and the songs become more universal. It was album was the soundtrack of my summer. Fun as hell.

|                     

My favorite movies of 2015: There are a lot

My top 10 list is never a list of the “best” movies, but rather the ones I liked the most. This is because I think there are some movies that might be technically better made that I didn’t actually enjoy, for whatever reason. Like Room. Anyway, here are my favorite movies of 2015.

  1. Mad Max: Fury Road. The third sequel to the post-apocalyptic classic Mad Max is best action film since The Matrix: jaw-dropping, bold, ambitious and thrilling. Max (now played by Tom Hardy) is again a loner on the run in the barren wasteland left by a nuclear war. He’s teamed with another lone wolf named Imperator Furiosa, who Charlize Theron instantly made iconic with physical and emotional ferocity. The genius of Fury Road is in Miller’s visual storytelling, from the wrenching and dusty roller coaster chase scenes to the still moments of sometimes horrid desert beauty, that feels totally new. This is operatic action, bombastic and intense and engulfing and almost exhausting.
  2. Carol. Todd Haynes’s indelible, sublime, a perfectly observed film is based on Patricia Hightower’s 1952 classic lesbian romance The Price of Salt. Carol, played with aching beauty by Cate Blanchett, is a wealthy suburban wife in the midst of a divorce, and Rooney Mara plays Therese, a young shop girl making her way in New York. Blanchett’s sly, wise, and only just barely vulnerable performance is among her best, and Mara is also extraordinary, expressing Therese’s wonder, love, and grief with subtlety and sympathy.
  3. Brooklyn. An assured Saoirse Ronan is Eilis, who leaves stifling small town Ireland for expansive and exciting Brooklyn in the early 1950s. She falls in love with an Italian-American plumber (Emery Cohen) but then returns home after a death in the family, suddenly unsure where she belongs. An intimate but universal immigrant’s story, Brooklyn expresses the conflicts, joys, and promise of leaving home. Nick Hornby’s adaptation of Colm Toibin’s novel is seamless.
  4. Ex Machina. Alex Garland made his directorial debut with this gorgeous psychological thriller about artificial intelligence, arrogance, and misogyny. Slight and nerdy Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a contest to spend a week with reclusive, eccentric tech genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a hard-drinking boxing enthusiast dude-bro. Caleb is actually brought to determine whether Nathan’s latest android has believably human artificial intelligence. Ava, played by Alicia Vikander, is clearly not human, but she is stunningly humanlike, both in her affect and her intuition. Vikander’s performance is epic, but it is Garland’s surprising, creepy, and powerful script that is the real star.
  5. Tangerine. This masterpiece of LGBT cinema is about one day in the lives of two transgender prostitutes in Hollywood. On Christmas Eve, hilariously enraged Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) is hunting down her boyfriend and the real fish he’s been cheating on her with. Meanwhile, weary, wise, and tough Alexandra (Mya Taylor) wanders the streets, looking for friends to tell about her cabaret show that night. Shot entirely on iPhones, the film is full of stunning compositions and saturated light. It is blisteringly funny and foul, and it is also moving: a paean to friendship and pride.
  6. The Revenant. Leonardo DiCaprio may finally win his Oscar for his harrowing and masochistic performance as the insanely determined Hugh Glass, a hunter and guide in the 18th century American frontier who is left for dead by the unscrupulous John Fitzgerald, played by a wicked and brilliant Tom Hardy. The movie is long, extremely violent, and at times unbelievable, but directed Alejandro González Iñárritu and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, The Revenent is engulfing, gorgeous, terrifying, and by the end, transcendent.
  7. Grandma. Lily Tomlin plays Elle Reid, a recently widowed lesbian poet who is broke, unglued, directionless, and a bit spiteful. When her teenaged granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) knocks on her door and says she needs $500 for an abortion, Elle must put herself together, find the money, and earn redemption in time for Sage’s late afternoon appointment. The funny, subversive, and very gay script comes from director Paul Weitz, who provides Tomlin one of her best characters, who in turn provides Tomlin the opportunity to give one of her greatest performances (which is saying something).
  8. Spotlight. This taut and smart depiction of Boston Globe reporters’ investigation into the sex abuse scandal in the Boston Catholic Church is the best film about journalism since All the President’s Men. Tom McCarthy’s trickless direction and his and Josh Singer’s efficient screenplay impeccably merge a complicated mystery with an indictment of a culture of secrecy, silence, and deference to power. Most of the film’s major characters are occasional or lapsed Catholics, and their personal angst over what their faith has done shows the toll this kind of reporting can take. The film is as much about how these reporters got the story as it is about how the story got them.
  9. Creed. Ryan Coogler’s Rocky sequel-cum-reboot turns Rocky into the trainer and Apollo Creed’s illegitimate son Donny into the boxer with something to prove. The plot is by-the-numbers boxing movie, but Sylvester Stallone’s seventh turn as Rocky Balboa is arguably his best, and Michael P. Jordan is again sterling, this time as the young man with anger-management problems and chip on his shoulder. Coogler pulls out these phenomenal performances and re-purposes the Rocky tropes perfectly, using the Philadelphia landscape, fight choreography, and iconic music in surprising and thrilling ways.
  10. The Big Short. Adam McKay has random celebrities – Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez –break the fourth wall to explain the Byzantine financial procedures that were at the center of the financial collapse in 2008. It’s gimmicky but it works, and the rest of this intricate and smartly written film about the financial experts who figured out what was happening is enraging, fascinating, and funny. The latest indictment of capitalist excess and immorality features most excellent turns from Steve Carrell and Christian Bale.

Movies that I also liked a lot or thought were very well made: The Martian. 45 Years. Sicario. Straight out of Compton. Steve Jobs. Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Anomalisa. The Clouds of Sils Maria. Room. Antman. Inside Out. While We’re Young. Magic Mike XXL.

|                    

Consuming Transgender for Oscar

First, I want to thank Greggor Mattson for this title.

Second, here’s my review for The Danish Girl, a wonderful novel turned into a problematic film.

The Danish Girl
Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by Lucinda Coxon
Starring Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, and Matthias Schoenaerts
Rated R

From the moment it was announced 15 years ago, the film adaptation of The Danish Girl, David Ebershoff’s acclaimed literary novel about one of the first men to have sex reassignment surgery, was a prestige project, a magnet for Oscars. For 15 years, artists of the caliber of Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Lasse Halstrom, and Neil Labute circled the film adaptation. Finally, the film was made. Last year’s Best Actor winner Eddie Redmayne was cast as Einar Wegener who would become Lili Elbe. The acclaimed Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is Einar’s wife Gerda. Oscar-winning director of The King’s Speech Tom Hooper would direct. I can imagine the attraction: Redmayne would get to portray the opposite gender in period dress; Vikander could show us her heart break while she remaining tough and determined; Hooper could mix a zeitgeisty social issue with a tragic love story and make it all look beautiful, refined, and important. I always find something a bit distasteful about making profit and reputations off the aestheticized suffering of others, but sometimes the art is powerful, interesting, or inspiring enough that I don’t mind the artists’ prizes. But I minded The Danish Girl.

In the early 1920s in Copenhagen, Einar and Gerda Wegener are young painters; Einar paints landscapes and Gerda does portraits. He is successful and initially, despite seeming to have a greater talent, she is not. One day, Gerda asks Einar to model women’s shoes and stockings when the actual model is late for a sitting; when the model arrives, she deems Einar-in-drag “Lili” and they all giggle. Continuing the joke, Einar brings back Lili, and Gerda paints her, and these paintings finally get art dealers to notice her. But Einar begins to prefer being Lili, and after they move to the more permissive Paris, Einar begins to disappear. As Gerda drifts between mortified and mystified, she befriends Einar’s oldest friend Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts), with whom Einar had a vaguely homoerotic childhood relationship. Einar/Lili attempts to find a cure, meeting with psychiatrists of various levels of sadism, and then meets a doctor who doesn’t want to cure Einar but rather turn him, through what we now call sex reassignment surgery, fully into Lili. But in the late 1920s, such surgery had never been done and no one had yet discovered antibiotics.

Ebershoff’s novel is a postmodern rewrite of the real life of Einar Wegener, whose diaries were a sensation in the Europe in the early 1930s. Ebershoff kept the outline of Einar/Lili’s story, but imagined Einar and Lili’s interior life, and he turned the real Gerda into a fictional Greta, making her a rebellious, iconoclastic American expatriate. But in Hooper’s film, written by Lucinda Coxon, Gerda returns to her Danish roots, though now she’s a proto-feminist. Clearly, a decision was made to tell a more “true” story, which would make the film’s prestige an easier sell. However, the real Gerda was bisexual and this version is heterosexual. The actual surgeries Lili was given are also changed, as is who did them, and perhaps more irritating to me, the circumstances of Lili’s death. While Lili’s transgenderism was groundbreaking, daring, subversive, and famous, the Lili in Hooper’s film is a lonely tragic figure, as if she were a Victorian heroine suffering oh-so-dramatically from consumption.

Hooper’s film is beautifully shot, and both Redmayne and Vikander’s performances are worthy of the Oscar nominations they’ll probably receive. But in turning Lili and Greta’s messy lives into a tear-jerking love story, a cliché of historical drama, and a story of the victimized minority Hooper and Coxon have done a disservice to the zeitgeisty social issue they hope to hijack: They transform Lili and Greta into a consumer product hoping to be emblazoned with a sticker that says “Oscar winner!” In a year that the brave and authentic Tangerine gave us the story of two transgender women surviving the streets of Los Angeles, when Caitlyn Jenner’s politics are more debated than her transition, The Danish Girl feels like it belongs to another era when pity passed for activism.

(Full disclosure: David Ebershoff, who wrote the novel the film is based on, is a friend of mine. The book suffers from none of the film’s problems. I am, of course, biased. But comparing, say, Ebershoff’s controlled, calm, almost sublime ending with Hooper’s maudlin one is really all one needs to see.)

|          

Steve Jobs was kind of a dick

As I’ve written before, no one should ever expect historical accuracy from a feature film that is “based on a true story.” But I think you can ask for some thematic or emotional truth. A Beautiful Mind, for instance, handles the impressive feat of Russell Crow’s John Nash overcoming his schizophrenia with great dramatic writing, but the real Nash probably didn’t do it by having conversations with hallucinations that were as reasonable as Paul Bettany’s Charles. So, I can’t fault the total fantasy of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for Steve Jobs, the new biopic about the co-founders of Apple who is constantly referred to as a genius, a visionary, and an asshole. Sorkin manages to do the duties of a biopic by focusing solely on the backstage conversations prior to three key product launches. The screenplay’s structure is both elegant and overly schematic, but Sorkin’s always recognizably witty and crackling dialogue makes up, or masks, the flaws. It helps that the words are recited by some of the best actors alive who are directed by the great Danny Boyle.

The film opens with grainy footage of Arthur C. Clark (who wrote the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey) explaining in the 1960s how computers will change our lives to an incredulous newscaster. The audience chuckles because the sci-fi writer predicts exactly the kind of instruments most of us have in our pockets, if not at home. The message of the film is then clear: It is Steve Jobs who makes this happen. (This is debatable.) Immediately, we are at the launch of the Macintosh – the iconic, revolutionary personal computer – in 1983. Jobs, played by the always thrilling Michael Fassbender at the height of his powers, is ordering everyone around, demanding the impossible, and basically being the narcissistic prick he had famously become since starting Apple in a garage with Steve Wozniak (an awesome Seth Rogan). Only Apple CEO and father figure John Scully (Jeff Daniels) and Jobs’s work wife and marketing head Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) can reason with Jobs, which is hard enough when it’s about the Mac and even more difficult when his ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennen (Katherine Waterston) and Lisa, the daughter Jobs refused to admit is his, show up.

It’s difficult to decide which person he’s nastier to: Chrisann, who desperately needs money; engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is trying to fix the Mac’s speech function for the demo; or Wozniak, who wants Jobs to acknowledge the people working on the Apple II, which was the company’s first success and Jobs wants to phase out. Chrisann and Hertzfeld succeed with their tasks but not with their pride intact, but Wozniak completely fails. All of these characters return to rehash, continue, or resolve these conflicts in the next two acts, which are based on the launch of Jobs’s Next Computer, which he developed after being fired (more or less) by Apple for his irascible ways, and the launch of the iMac, the computer that brought Apple back to life after Scully is fired and Jobs is rehired.

While Jobs is on screen at virtually every moment, few of his dialogue partners are ever on screen with each other. It feels very much like a beautifully filmed play; intense and cerebral but also claustrophobic. It is the series of one-and-on conversations that both tell us Jobs’s biographical details and show us how his relationships with these key people – particularly Joann, Scully, Wozniak, and Lisa (most importantly played by Perla Haney-Jardine in Act 3) – explain his drive, his genius, and his failures as a friend and father. The ending is unnecessarily pat, but neither Aaron Sorkin nor Danny Boyle would ever refuse to please the crowd. And the film is a crowd pleaser, funny and wise, daring and illuminating. It is also hagiography, showing Jobs’s great faults but also lifting him onto a pedestal with people like Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan. Which is exactly where Steve Jobs thought he should be.

Steve Jobs
Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Aaron Sorkin
Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, and Seth Rogan
Inexplicably Rated R
At your local multiplex

|