Steve Jobs is not a biopic, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin recently claimed on The Daily Show. In his script, the Apple founder’s formative moments are not life events, but product launches. Divided into three scenes—the backstage preparations for the unveiling of the Macintosh personal computer in 1984, the debut of the ill-fated NeXT computer in 1988, and the introduction of the iMac in 1998—the film takes place in nearly real time. The result is A Christmas Carol for technocrats, a morality play in which figures from Jobs’ past appear as supplicants, begging a venal, cruel, imperious, charming, rich man to do the right thing.

Often, the right thing amounts to simple respect, something Steve Jobs, played by Michael Fassbender, invariably withholds. The key question of the film is whether Jobs will acknowledge the paternity of his daughter, Lisa, an act which will be less a kindness or a duty in this film’s skewed morality, than an opportunity to redeem Jobs’ own character. Here, Jobs is not just a corporate tyrant, a latter-day robber baron in mock turtleneck and dad jeans, but a “tyrant saint.”

The halo of martyrdom rests uneasily on Jobs’ head, but there it is all the same. The movie may not end with the CEO’s death, but it does show him smiling beatifically, winking out of view under the glare of stage-lights. This is the immortality reserved for Jobs, as he ascends to the great keynote presentation in the sky.

Biopic or not, Steve Jobs, like every movie of its type, is doomed to swim in the same waters, relentlessly parsed for deviations from reality and battled over by Jobs’ former colleagues, heirs, industry acolytes, Apple fanboys, lawyers, and armchair epistemologists. Perhaps this is the reason the movie exists—to re-catalyze an overworked cultural dispute that essentially boils down to one proposition: Steve Jobs was an asshole, but he made you love his technology more than any human interaction.

As a piece of consumerist propaganda, and one more entry in the revisionist canon, Steve Jobs is magnificent. Capably shot, well acted (notwithstanding Kate Winslet’s shape-shifting accent), its score propulsive, if a little too insistent, it’s a finely crafted piece of work. But as a film, I found it nearly insufferable. It brought to mind a Walter Kirn review of Solar, a novel by Ian McEwan, which Kirn called “a book so good—so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off—that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either. It’s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.”