'Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine' hacks away at Apple myths

The documentary "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine" captures, in its succinct subtitle, the contradictions inherent in its subject.

Jobs, who founded Apple Computer with his friend Steve Wozniak in 1976, is presented as both brilliant and abrasive: a driven and at times deceitful tyrant whose firm made some of the most beautifully designed consumer electronics of the past couple of decades. All this was accomplished by a businessman who harbored fantasies of becoming a Buddhist monk, even as he authorized strong-arm legal tactics against a lowly tech reporter who dared to write about a prototype iPhone that had been inadvertently leaked before its release.

Jobs was both an artist and a deeply flawed human being, in the harsh assessment of filmmaker Alex Gibney's portrait — a nonfiction interlude between last year's "Jobs," starring Ashton Kutcher, and director Danny Boyle's "Steve Jobs," which will present Michael Fassbender in the title role next month, scripted by Aaron Sorkin ("The Social Network").

Gibney's film begins not with the creation of Apple Computer, but with the outpouring of worldwide grief over Jobs's death 35 years later, slowly working its way backward toward an understanding of why so many people came to feel so personally connected to this business mogul.

The collage-like picture it arrives at is not simple.

Gibney's film is unflattering, yet it's far from a hatchet job. The documentarian presents scores of interview subjects who shed light on Jobs's well-known scandals, including his initial denial of paternity of his daughter Lisa, a scheme involving the backdating of stock options and other examples of misbehavior, large and small. Yet when one former employee still tears up while reminiscing about some of his harsh work experiences under Jobs, it's not in pain, seemingly, but because of the strong mixed feelings — love mixed with hate — that he still harbors toward his late boss. Jobs died in 2011 at the age of 56.

Jobs himself appears often throughout the film, seen at product launches, legal depositions and in interviews dating to when he still looked like a smug, smirking hippie, being outfitted in an uncomfortable suit and tie for an early television news segment. The picture that emerges is fractured, making for a portrait that's as fascinating as it is baffling.

Is he likable? For the most part, no. Jobs spoke often of his company's "values," which by implication were as impeccable as its products. Yet, as Gibney's film points out, Jobs didn't believe in corporate charity and refused to talk to activists concerned about the environmental impact of the company's Chinese manufacturing plants.

The Steve Jobs we see here is not one his most passionate customers would recognize. He comes across as petty and controlling, in sharp contrast to the image — cultivated by Jobs himself — as an inventor of objects meant to unlock creativity and liberate our minds from the tyranny of the soulless PC.

If anything, the film complicates our already complicated relationship with this stranger in a black mock turtleneck who grew to become the face of the machines that we now think of as extensions of ourselves. It's a necessary corrective to the myths that have grown around Steve Jobs, obscuring a man that many of us never knew existed.

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Three stars. Rated R. Contains some coarse language. 127 minutes.

Ratings Guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.