Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet star in 'Steve Jobs'

STEVE JOBS' famous Reality Distortion Field, created by his feats of persuasive razzle dazzle, gets turned against him in the new movie bearing his name.

The wacky, don't-call-it-a-biopic "Steve Jobs" creates a distortion field of its own - it's loosely based on Walter Isaacson's biography, but is obviously and flagrantly slippery in its use of facts.

Even its casting is strange. Michael Fassbender looks nothing like Jobs and makes no attempt to mimic him, adding to a wave of dissent from This-Isn't-The-Real-Steve detractors.

To them, I pose a question: You would prefer Ashton Kutcher?

The title character in "Steve Jobs" isn't a facsimile of a particular man, but a portrait of a type of man - the sort of genius/huckster who has been a central character in the American story since Thomas Edison, who also changed lives with technology, and also was accused of being an insufferable cheapskate who pawned off others' work as his own.

The question posed in "Steve Jobs" is whether these rare individuals, with their visionary perspective and ruthless drive to compete and succeed, are compatible with the rest of us.

"I'm poorly made," says Jobs, in a rare moment of self-criticism. As spoken by Fassbender, it recalls his performance as a cyborg in "Prometheus," except that the robot was programmed to be polite, and Jobs never is.

The movie opens with Jobs brow-beating an engineer (Michael Stuhlbarg), demanding that audio glitches be repaired for the crucial launch of the Macintosh. The scene affirms that Jobs could be a tyrant, and establishes the beat-the-clock gimmick that writer Aaron Sorkin deploys - effectively - to give the movie its racing pulse.

Each of the three segments is a breathless backstage 40 minutes leading to the unveiling of a new computing machine that is never finished until the last moment, and sometimes not even then.

In each vignette, Jobs has tense emotional encounters with the movie's key characters - his former girlfriend (Katherine Waterston), the biological daughter (played by a trio of actresses) he initially disowns, the co-founder he treats poorly (Seth Rogen, as Steve Wozniak) and the corporate father figure (Jeff Daniels) who becomes central to a mini-drama about betrayal. Hovering around Jobs throughout is the hectoring conscience he does not have - in the person of longtime Apple marketing pro Joanna Hoffman, played by Kate Winslet.

These scenes are obviously far fetched - the same roster of characters, turning up in 10-year intervals with the same complaints - but they are terrifically well-acted by all, sharply scripted by Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle with his usual caffeinated, color-drenched intensity, a nice match for Sorkin's style.

The movie is always entertaining, even when it's unfair to Jobs, as it is when it inflates the acrimony between him and his illegitimate daughter, though their estrangement is obviously (even clumsily) used as a dramatic device created to add a dash of schmaltz to a third act reconciliation on a rooftop garage.

Still, it's a sturdy scene, nicely played by actress Perla Haney-Jardine. And there is some subtlety there, as well. Boyle has chosen to pose the young woman in front of a bright blue Volkswagen Beetle - I think to link the car with the design of Jobs' Apple-saving new iMac we've just seen, and to link automobiles and computers in our minds as mankind-altering devices.

The movie jabs at Jobs, but in the end surrenders to the idea of Jobs as a transformative, transcendent figure.

In the final moments he's bathed in a shimmering halo, as if about to visit another dimension, like Neo in "The Matrix."

Only he doesn't walk toward the light.

He's Steve Jobs.

The light walks toward him.

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