The first of what will surely be an unending wave of Steve Jobs films (Aaron Sorkin is hard at work on his) is here, and a doozy it’s not; Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs is about as straightforward and unremarkable a hero’s story as you can imagine, never mind the elephant in the room that is Ashton Kutcher‘s strained and uneven take riff the Apple genius. Despite all its shortcomings, a few elements work: the focus on Jobs pre-iPod/iMac, the strong supporting cast, the willingness of the filmmakers to show Jobs at his darkest and most unlikable. What it comes down to is that the negatives severely outweigh the positives, a disparity that the real Jobs would have likely thrown a spitting, fuming tantrum over.

The film opens in 2001, with Jobs’ reveal of the iPod (Kutcher’s resemblance to the man is actually pretty startling.) Then, we zip back to 1971, where he’s a stinky, bare-footed, horny hippy at Reed College. He takes embarks on an LSD trip and we’re treated to one of the most idiotic-looking montages I’ve seen—Kutcher is flailing his hands like a fool in an attempt to pantomime an orchestra conductor while (you guessed it) orchestra music plays and the camera twirls around his dunce ballet. This is meant to show that he’s a genius, that mind works complexly, somewhat musically, and on a plane we can’t understand. Instead, it comes off as silly and heavy-handed. I get that Kutcher’s dumb expression is appropriate—he’s tripping balls after all—but the sequence just feels confused.

After an enlightening journey to India and some fiddling around as a technician at Atari, we see Jobs and his buddy “Woz” (Steve Wozniak, played endearingly by Josh Gad) found Apple computers (they work out of Jobs’ parents’ house). Now we dive into the meat and potatoes. Fueled by Jobs’ drive and ingenuity, company grows and grows, until it’s so big that its board of directors—who don’t appreciate the high financial risks of Jobs’ lofty vision—fires Jobs, booting him from the company he birthed in his parents’ garage. Years later, as Apple flirts with irrelevancy in the ’90s, they invite Jobs back, and he returns triumphantly (we glimpse conceptualizations of the first iMac, you know, the awesome candy-colored ones.)

The story Stern and writer Michael Whitely are trying to tell is actually a good one. The period of Jobs’ life they focus on is rife with all the trappings of a great drama. What they fumble with is getting the bits of story to cohere to a central arc. Some scenes, like one in which Jobs screams and breathes fire into a phone with Bill Gates on the other end, lead nowhere. In fact, it feels like a lot of the characters are thrown in simply to make those familiar with the Jobs story go “Ah! I know who that is!” It contributes almost zero to the narrative. “Steve, I’d like you to meet [insert name of guy from his biography].”

Kutcher puts forth a good effort. He really does. It’s clear that he’s spent days and days perfecting Jobs’ slouched saunter, his Midwest/Californian accent, and his infamously volcanic temper. Plus, he unquestionably looks the part. But, there are two problems here, the first and most important of which is that he simply doesn’t have the acting chops to carry the film. You can see it in his eyes; he’s constantly, desperately grasping at the emotion he’s trying to communicate, and when (if) he finally finds it, he gets overly excited and plays it way too big and loud. Everything he does feels magnified (his accent feels painfully forced), but that’s not the most distracting thing.

With some actors (Will Smith, Angelina Jolie), I have difficulty divorcing their character from their celebrity. Ashton Kutcher is the prime example of this barrier to belief. When I see him, I see the guy from “Punk’d” who wears funny hats and tweets on the daily. I just can’t shake it. Unlike a lot of actors, he’s made himself widely accessible to the public, which makes it nigh impossible for me to dissociate his face from his fame. I believe it’s the actor’s job to convince us of their role, to deceive our perceptions of who we think they are in reality. By this standard, Kutcher may have dug himself into a hole too deep to escape.

Kutcher does show glimpses of fine acting—some (not all) scenes where he seethes and bursts with rage are truly intense, and a pivotal bedroom breakdown (captured nicely by Stern) resonates emotionally. Whiteley’s dialogue is blunt and heavy-handed, but the supporting players have no problem making their lines count (legendary character actor J.K. Simmons plays a great jerk as a member of the board of directors.) The film isn’t the complete stinker I feared it would be; I love that it cuts off just before Jobs’ glory days (we only get a brief look at the “keynote master” Steve Jobs we’re all so familiar with), and Stern illustrates vividly his fight to conquer the mountainous challenges he was faced with. Unfortunately, the film’s major moving parts are damaged, effectively crashing the machine. Send this one back to the factory.

Jobs opens this Friday, August 16th.

Jobs trailer

The inevitable first wave of Steve Jobs movies is upon us, and it’s no surprise so many studios and filmmakers are salivating at getting their version of his story projected on screens across the world; Steve Jobs is one of the geniuses of our time, somewhat of an enigma, and has changed the world with his ideas. Director Joshua Michael Stern has the enviable (or unenviable, depending on how you see it) position of having his take on Jobs’ story, jOBS, be the first of many to hit theaters. He chatted with us about the pros and cons of being first, whether Jobs was a good person or not, what made Jobs so frustrated all the time, Ashton Kutcher’s approach to the iconic role, and more.

jOBS, starring Ashton Kutcher, opens in theaters this Friday, August 16^th.

There have been a lot of filmmakers and studios clamoring to make a Steve Jobs film. Did you feel any pressure being the first out of the gate?
I did. You know, it’s really hard to be the first one out of the gate, but we really did rely on a lot of what was known about him, which is not very much—he was a true enigma. To be the first was a very scary thing, but this entire project was frightening.

Did you want to be the first?
I think it was important to us when we started, but that wasn’t the goal. It just happened quickly, and we knew that it was important to make it happen because there will be other people making these movies. It was scary, but for me, if it’s not scary, it’s not worth doing. If it was going to fail, it was going to fail big! [The film] was ambitious, but a lot of fun and really rewarding.

It is ambitious, and I think one of the smartest choices you made was to not concentrate on the Steve Jobs we’re all familiar with, but instead showing us how he got to be that man.
That was the intention, showing his early 20’s to his late 30’s. [The story] stops a couple years before the first iMac—that blue, translucent pod-like computer that became known and people associate with Mac. For me, it was everything that happened before that—the prehistory, what it took for him to get us there, the adversity that he encountered, and the fact that a man with less fight and vision would have given up. It was a very dramatic story and it had all the hallmarks of a great drama—the villains, the palace intrigue, and the emotionally wrenching moments that you look for in any movie—but this was really his life. It’s a movie, to me, about a man who has an epiphany about what he wants to do. He never separates from that product again. He becomes one with Apple. He becomes Apple. It becomes his obsession, and this is a movie about obsession as well.

After getting to know Mr. Jobs through your research, do you think he was a good person? Or is this an irrelevant question?
I think it’s subjective. If what you define “good” by is someone who shows love by giving the world products that he loves and he thinks will make their lives better, then he’s a wonderful person. I think that’s what he wanted to do from the beginning. He was sincerely, in my opinion, that man. He cared deeply about what he was giving people.

One of the things that became very obvious to me, especially when he was younger, when he first started the company, was that people told me he had a really hard time explaining things. This is from a man who’s known for his keynote speeches where he speaks brilliantly. He was trying to articulate technology that didn’t exist, but he could see it. It’s like a musician who’s like Bach, but he’s never read or knows anything about music, but he wants to explain the Aria to musicians who don’t know what he’s talking about. He’s said many times in his interviews that things were “obvious”, but to others, things weren’t obvious, and that would breed frustration, and that frustration was evident in everything that he did. He was very rarely wrong, but it took so much and was so expensive to give him the things he wanted. It’s still true, by the way. Mac products are still expensive.

I’ve often thought that the greatest symbolic realization of Steve Jobs’ dream is the iPhone. I was at a lunch somewhere where the busboy—who makes under five dollars an hour—and a multi-millionaire eating at a table both had an iPhone. It was the leveler. It was his technology in the hands of everybody, from the poorest to the wealthiest person on earth. A billionaire probably has an iPhone, and his gardener probably has an iPhone. The big obstacle when he was developing all this technology was to be pure within himself to do all the research and development internally, and not do it like every other company does it—including Google, including everybody—where they just buy a company that has spent all that money, done all that research, and incorporate it into their own. He did everything internally.

There’s a great sequence just after he receives the news that he’s about to be a father and tells the mother to fuck off, basically. He has a private breakdown in his bedroom, seething and looking almost monstrous. Talk a bit about Ashton’s performance.
I can’t say enough about Ashton in this movie. He was so committed to this role since day one. He researched the role and lived the role. He gave himself to this part and this movie in a whole, complete way. It’s a difficult role to live in because Steve was a very conflicted person. If you’re going to play him, you’re also going to have to fall in love with him, because you’re going to have to justify his actions, some of which were not popular and not kind on the surface. [Everyone has things that] are eccentricities to everybody else, but to us they make sense. That’s the truth about all of us, and nobody more than Steve Jobs.

I really constructed that scene to represent the fact that he felt, but he couldn’t communicate. He couldn’t quite tell his girlfriend what was really going on with him, but when he left the room, you could see it broke him apart. That scene that you pointed out—and you’re the first to do it, so I’m glad you did—is pivotal for me. It’s the moment where he becomes “Jobs.” He goes from being this hippy to letting go of his past, letting go of the girl he’s dating, letting go of Daniel Kottke—who he never speaks to again—and symbolically letting go of Steve Wozniak. He becomes what he needed to become. He puts his hair to the side, and…BAM!

So that’s the moment.
That’s the moment. To me, that scene and when he’s crying in his father’s arms are sort of bookends to that period of his life. That was a very important moment. Ashton just went into the room, and there was just a cameraman, nobody else in the room with him. We talked the scene through, I gave him certain things to hit, and he would just do it. It was great.

I like how you show a close-up of him sort of frantically adjusting his belt.
We put a lot of the mannerisms of Steve in the film. I could spend a whole movie shooting Steve Jobs’ hands and crazy-focused eyes. But yeah, those were little anxious, obsessive things he used to do with his fingers. I’m glad you mentioned that scene. It’s a great representation of Jobs. He spoke to his girlfriend, he wanted to make his reality the truth—which was that he wasn’t a father—so he just walked into a room, broke down, and then brought himself together, coming out of the next scene sort of realized. To me, it’s like an origin story where he puts on his uniform (laughs.)

Was Ashton comfortable taking on such an intimidating role?
He was scared. He did so much preparation so that when he arrived on set he could focus. He worked with a coach, he lost 15 pounds, he went on a fructarian diet, which is the diet Steve was on when he was young.

So he took care of the nerves before he arrived on set.
He had nerves. He was calling me up at 2am. “Man, I don’t know if I’ve got it. What are we doing tomorrow?” He needed to know those things. Acting is, in my opinion, very difficult, in that, the night before a big scene, you know that by 6am tomorrow you have a big, cathartic scene where you have to break down. And, if you don’t nail that scene—if you’re not on cue, if you’re not connected, if you’re not in the moment—that scene will live in the movie forever, not fully realized. That’s a lot of pressure. I have to have the kind of relationship with the actor to where I give them space when they arrive on set to really work on getting him there. Ashton really got into the headspace before he got on set every day, and sometimes that was a rough place to be. He needed to be this guy, and this guy wasn’t always fun to be. There’s a lot of frustration in the early Mac days. He kind of carried that weight in the role. Steve in his late 30’s, when he comes back to Mac and sort of takes over again, is much more realized and so much more zen and thoughtful, and beginning to be that guy that we saw ten years after that.

Award winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has been confirmed to write the new Steve Job biopic simply named Steve Jobs. Aaron Sorkin won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Social Network last year and will hope to continue his success with the screenplay of former Apple CEO visionary Steve Jobs. The film will be based off the biography by Walter Isaacson. [Playlist]

Which leads into the next topic, former That 70’s Show star Ashton Kutcher will be portraying the late-great Steve Jobs in a completely separate film than the one mentioned above. A few pictures have recently been leaked, check them out and see if you think he can pull it off. He has big shoes to fill. [Filmschool Rejects]

Paul Reubens confirms the new “Pee-Wee Herman” movie will start shooting soon. This new film would be the third installment of the franchise that began with the 1985 cult classic “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” followed by “Big Top Pee-Wee” in 1988. [Coming Soon]

In case you have been living under a rock this week, Cannes Film Festival is going on right now and reviews are starting to pour in from around the web. The staff here at Way Too Indie are working on compiling a list of our most anticipated films for this year’s festival.

The director who brought us Pineapple Express and the TV show Eastbound and Down, David Gordon Green’s latest film will be a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria. To lead the film will be Isabella Fuhrman who already has one horror film experience from Orphan. [IFC]

Paste Magazine reports that a Brooklyn based indie band named Here We Go Magic found and picked up John Waters hitchhiking on an Ohio highway. The infamous indie/arthouse director John Waters had been quoted to say that hitchhiking is “a great way to have sex.” It would be shocking if it was any other director, but for Waters it seems about right. [Paste Magazine]

It is no secret that Stanley Kubrick was a bit of a control freak. He was careful about doing interviews, often opting to have full editorial control over his own quotes. This type of control and attention to detail is what made his films masterpieces. Moviefone has an interesting article on how Stanley Kubrick insisted that he took his own Newsweek cover, something that was never done. It’s part of an excellent three article installment on Stanley Kubrick. [Moviefone]