Hollywood might someday design a sleek, prestige biopic worthy of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

For now, he’s gotten a Dell.

“Jobs,” the pedestrian, inelegant film starring an earnest Ashton Kutcher certainly wouldn’t have satisfied the ruthlessly exacting computer marketing genius.

Directed by Joshua Michael Stern, “Jobs” hits the well- known personal and professional milestones, beginning with Jobs and childhood friend Steve “Woz” Wozniak (Josh Gad) setting up shop in a garage to build and market the compact computer that would change the world.

Apple expands, Apple stumbles, and the monstrously prickly Jobs is ousted by his own board of directors, returning a decade later to save the sinking brand, turn computer shells blue and fill ears with music.

Neither Stern (2008’s “Swing Vote”) nor first-time screenwriter Matt Whitely tackle the globally transformative financial and social implications of Jobs’s accomplishments, nor do they delve into the technical specifics that might convey the magic of bytes and binary codes.

Overwrought Music

It’s just as well. The two can barely manage simple character drama without cliche pronouncements (“Steve, you are your own worst enemy”) and overwrought musical cues.

Kutcher isn’t the joke some feared. Nuance is beyond his gesticulating reach, but he mostly handles the script’s big emotional notes: irate cruelty, shifty-eyed scheming, near- spiritual motivational uplift.

Gad, dialing back his broader comic instincts, plays Woz as Jobs’s Jiminy Cricket, champion of his partner’s better self and purveyor of teary-eyed remember-whens.

Dermot Mulroney, as Apple’s early angel investor Mike Markkula, conveys the company’s growing discomfort with the boss’s egomania, and Matthew Modine is a weasely John Sculley.

J.K. Simmons is appropriately hateworthy as short-sighted corporate hatchet man Arthur Rock. Even Steven himself might have been pleased.

“Jobs,” from Open Road Films, is playing across the U.S.