Although the soundtrack does not technically feature opera music, Steve Jobs (2015) resembles the medium through stylistic choices and references which lend an air of high drama to what otherwise could be a conventional biopic. The characters never break out into arias, but they speak to a Sorkinian rhythm and move through director Danny Boyle’s blood-pumping visuals to Daniel Pemberton’s emotionally swelling music dotted with tunes from Bob Dylan, The Libertines, and The Maccabees. Instead of a booming tenor, we have Michael Fassbender gritting and gnashing the tension of a Steve Jobs torn between stress and showmanship while preparing for three separate product launches.

Foregoing the now tired cradle-to-grave biopic format, Steve Jobs is structured in three acts around each of those product launches (for the Macintosh, NeXT, and the iMAC)—actually three scenes happening in real time, with each centering on the preparations for a product launch presentation. (Operas can have anywhere from one to five acts, but each act of an opera features a single, real-time setting like the sequences in Steve Jobs.) All three acts of Steve Jobs bring personal and professional issues to the forefront, which the film then spotlights in flashbacks.

The combination of rushing dialogue, evocative score, and potent performances pulse through the film’s tight plot and stark imagery to create an unmistakable atmosphere of operatic grandeur and gravitas. In one flashback, Jobs icily states that he “invented the future” while rain pours heavily and the score upswings in dramatic tones. The subplot’s key points of misunderstanding, betrayal, and revenge swell to a theatrical level underneath the surface actions of preparing for a stage show.

In the second act, Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) presses Steve Jobs for what it is that Jobs actually does. With not so much as a blink (and not-so-coincidentally standing in the orchestra pit of The San Francisco Opera House), Jobs quotes a famous conductor and explains, “Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.” Commanding, irksome, but ultimately correct, this is the Steve Jobs we know through Apple lore and archives, and he is given extra panache on-screen.

Thematically, the Boyle-Sorkin iteration of Steve Jobs’ story is one of a misunderstood genius pummeling his way to greatness. Along the way, the character finds redemption through the ingenue figure of his daughter Lisa (Mackenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, Perla Haney-Jardine), whom he finally comes to accept as his child after years of protesting paternity results with mother Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), as well as through his buddy-battling relationship with confidante-employee Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet).

Tying back into the film’s more direct references to opera, Hoffman makes a tongue-in-cheek reference to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which has become notorious as one of the most outrageously poorly received performances of all time (the audience was so overwhelmed by distaste for the avant-garde work that they not only booed but also tore out opera seats). Just as the Paris elite clamored to see Stravinsky’s latest work, so did the techies for the latest from the guy behind that “1984” ad. This feels an apt comparison as we watch the camera turn to the product launch’s audience cheering, clapping, and doing “the wave.” In that moment, Boyle takes the film and our spectatorship to a meta level, as we in the audience clamor for what could either be a well-publicized flop or a career highlight, ready to boo or applaud the “final bow” of the closing credits.