‘Steve Jobs’ (2015): Messy Personal Life (Trailer)

Apple Computers’ late co-founder Steve Jobs has already received the cinematic biopic treatment once since he passed away in 2011, but that film (the Ashton Kutcher-starring Jobs) was both a critical and commercial dud. By comparison, the upcoming Steve Jobs – a movie that combines the talents of Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle – is already regarded as being a potential awards-season contender, when it arrives in Fall 2015.

Steve Jobs stars Michael Fassbender as its namesake, a tech innovator whose endured more than his pair share of personal drama in his life, while also frequently rubbing those around him the wrong way with his demanding attitude and manner. Sorkin’s screenplay for the film reportedly gets by narrative structure by exploring the events that unfolded off-stage (or behind closed doors) in Jobs’ life, centered around three key Apple product launch events.

The full-length Steve Jobs trailer is here and based on the trailer footage alone, it’s fair to assume that Boyle’s Jobs biopic will be superior to the Kutcher-headlined version. Visually, Steve Jobs just looks a whole lot more cinematic than Jobs (2013), while the storyline is shaping up to be fair less conventional in structure than your average Hollywood biographical feature that deals with the life of a famous (though controversial) real-life envelope-pusher.

Similarly, the dialogue – long considered Sorkin’s strong suit as a writer – seems quite sharp and well-executed, thanks to a solid cast that (as a whole) appear to be on their A-game here. That includes Seth Rogen in a surprisingly dramatic turn as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, a key marketing executive and member of the original Macintosh team; and Jeff Daniels (who reunites with Sorkin here, after their work on The Newsroom) as the former Apple CEO John Sculley.

Naturally, as well-craft and acted as Steve Jobs looks to be, one’s personal interest in the movie will in part depend on whether or not they care to learn more about Steve Jobs in the first place. After all, compared to the subject matter behind such recent films as the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game (which frequently plays out as a WWII spy drama/thriller) or the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything (a film that offers a complex and compelling love story), a story about the folk behind your Apple products seems less deserving of multiple big screen adaptations.

On the other hand, Sorkin’s The Social Network script featured a version of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that may not be so true to life, but (frankly) is probably more interesting than the real guy. With Fassbender lending his screen presence to Jobs, there’s fair reason to believe certain moviegoers will find the big screen version of the Apple icon to be equally (if not more) fascinating as his real-world counterpart, too.

Steve Jobs opens in U.S. theaters on October 9th, 2015.