Winner: Michael Fassbender —
Steve Jobs

Brief synopsis: 1984…1988…1998. The Apple Macintosh…The NeXT Computer…The iMac. The Flint Center…The War Memorial Opera House…The Davies Symphony Hall. Told in three parts, we take a theatrical behind the scenes tour of the most important events of Steve Jobs’s career: the launch of three computer systems that changed the shape of the industry forever. But while Jobs tries to pilot the ship, his private demons constantly hound him in the form of Joanna Hoffman (Job’s marketing executive), Steve Wozniak (Apple’s co-founder), John Sculley (1983-1993 Apple CEO), Andy Hertzfeld (a member of the original Mac team), and Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Steve Jobs’s daughter). To Jobs, these five people are distractions. They pry him away from successfully showcasing whatever computer system is up next. But over the course of 14 years and 3 locations, Jobs starts to realize that while he’s been obsessed with his career, he’s been missing out on the main event... his life. 

Steve Jobs (both the film and the character) is a modern-day Shakespearean drama. The screenplay is Aaron Sorkin’s typical breakneck pace, with topics of conversation flying at the audience quicker than we can digest. But even if the technical jargon sails over our heads, the point is not to understand Steve Jobs (because it’s not like any of the characters in the film do, anyway); it’s to paint a portrait of an American icon in all of his triumphs and failings. At the heart of this is his very fractured relationships with five main figures in his life: Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Andy Hertzfeld, and Lisa Brennan-Jobs. 

Michael Fassbender delivers an outstanding performance as the Apple co-founder with the black turtleneck. As we follow Jobs over the film’s three acts — divided into the three launch dates (1984, 1988, 1998) of important computer systems he piloted — the story peels away, bit by bit, the man behind Apple. And it’s not pretty. The five relationships featured in the film all have very different dynamics, which force Fassbender/Jobs to constantly role shift, exchanging one heated exchange for another as the supporting cast hounds him backstage during each computer launch to air out their grievances. For Jobs, it’s an emotional bloodbath. He basically spends the first two acts burning every bridge he has, and then spends the last act trying to repair them (though only as far as this version of Jobs is willing to extend an olive branch). What’s most impressive about Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs are the changes in his personality as we time jump from 1984 to 1988 to 1998. We see the maturity and the regret (but not necessarily the willpower to set things right), and we feel exhausted watching Fassbender’s performance because he never has a moment in the film to relax or even take a deep breath. Almost every scene is a two-person rapid-fire dialogue between Jobs and another person (because he’s in a mad rush to finish the conversations as quickly as possible so he can start whatever computer launch on time), which in itself is a perfect parallel for a man (at least from the film’s perspective) whose life of never-ending innovation and manipulation often leads him to make rash decisions and speak carelessly to people in his personal life.