A documentary by Alex Gibney. Rating unavailable.

If Steve Jobs wasn’t real, we’d have to invent him. And that’s partially what we’ve done, according to this profile from Alex Gibney, who previously put Lance Armstrong, Julian Assange, Frank Sinatra, and Hunter S. Thompson under the cinemicroscope.

Made for CNN Films, the two-hour doc is obligated by its subtitle to unearth the man in the machine—a challenge made even harder, of course, by the subject’s 2011 death. This effort kicks off and closes with musings on a worldwide outpouring of human emotion usually reserved for religious leaders and revered heads of state. It wasn’t Jobs’s charisma—real enough to those seduced and eventually bulldozed by his business practices—that triggered the response, but his products, now widely seen as accessories in the next stage of human evolution. But are laptops, phones, and music-compression devices really crucial to our existence or just glorified toys?

That question is further complicated by Jobs’s own lifelong insistence on the spirituality of his pursuits. An enduring fascination with Zen Buddhism and many experiments with LSD (barely mentioned here but prominent in Ashton Kutcher’s 2013 Jobs) convinced him that the personal computer and other refinements would be more effective than political activism. (In the HBO series Silicon Valley, a Jobs-like tycoon complains of a rival company, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place.”)

The tech upstart is seen here through the somewhat jaundiced eyes of California cohorts like first girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (mother of his daughter Lisa), hotshot engineer Bob Belleville, and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Some pad their parts slightly, or have perhaps told their stories too often—an effect underscored by melodramatic, TV-like music. None of today’s Apple corps talked to Gibney, reflecting the founder’s high degree of paranoia, as displayed in his decidedly non-Buddhist treatment of press, former employees, and—most callously—slavelike workers at Chinese manufacturing plants.

Ultimately, the stylish film offers only a few new glimpses of the man. But it will be only a month or so until Michael Fassbender dons the black turtleneck and glasses, in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, with a script by Aaron Sorkin. Because we’re still inventing the man.