And there is very little argument to be had here: That’s exactly what Jobs did.

But how, exactly, did he do it? The method in the magic is the subject of Alex Gibney’s new documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine—think Going Clear, but about a person—which offers a decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the man who insisted that “computer” should be spelled with an “i.” The film isn’t arguing against Jobs’s membership in history’s elite cadre of Dent-Putters; it is arguing, though, that he—and we—deserve more than the empty conveniences of hagiography. It’s attempting to rethink Jobs’s legacy in a way that implicates the legend and complicates the lore. The film opens with images of the makeshift memorials erected in Jobs’s honor after his death in 2011. “It’s not often,” Gibney (the film’s narrator as well as its director) remarks, “that the whole planet seems to mourn a loss.”

Cut to a clip of a YouTubed tribute to Jobs starring a kid who looks to be about 10 years old. “He made the iPhone,” the young eulogist says. “He made the iPad. He made the iPod Touch. He made everything.”

It’s quite fair to say, with due respect to both the networked nature of invention and the severe limitations of the great man theory of history, that the kid is right: The iPhone, and the many other devices Apple has produced over the years, exist because of Steve Jobs. He may have been more of a “tweaker,” as Malcolm Gladwell put it, than an inventor, but he was the vision guy. And he was the sell-the-vision guy. Gibney acknowledges that. “He had the ability,” Regis McKenna, who designed Apple’s earliest and most ground-breaking marketing campaigns, tells the director in an interview, “to talk about what this computer could be … He gives people this feeling of forward movement.”

Jobs’s vision—informed by Buddhism and Bauhaus and calligraphy and poetry and humanism, a willful fusion of ars and techne—led to the machines into which so many of us pour our souls and our selves. He staffed Apple with people who “under different circumstances would be painters and poets,” but who in the digital age would choose computers as the medium through which “to express oneself to one’s fellow species.” He emphasized artistry, and spirituality. As Gibney’s voice-over points out: An iPhone’s screen, when the power has gone off and the light from beneath it has been extinguished, ends up reflecting its user.

All of which makes it tempting to ignore another thing about Steve Jobs: He could be, on top of so much else, a terrible person. Not just a jerk, occasionally and innocuously, but a bully and a tyrant. (“Bold. Brilliant. Brutal,” The Man in the Machine’s tagline sums it up.) Jobs regularly parked his unlicensed Mercedes in handicapped spots. He abandoned the mother of his unborn child, acknowledging his daughter only after a court case proved his paternity. He betrayed colleagues who stopped being useful to him. He made the still-useful ones cry. This is on top of the apparent disdain for charitable giving and the Gizmodo fiasco and the stock fraud suit and the many horrors of Foxconn.