The trailer for the second Steve Jobs film to be released this year has been released, offering an insight into the life of the late tech icon from stitched together archival footage and interviews.

Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine is the latest project from Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney, who also directed The Armstrong Lie and Scientology flick Going Clear. It will go head-to-head with Universal's Steve Jobs blockbuster written by The Newsroom's Aaron Sorkin.

The feature-length documentary has been pieced together with archival footage of Jobs and interviews with his co-workers, and offers an unflattering look at the late Apple CEO as someone who was cut-throat and demanding.

While Gibney produced the project without the help of Jobs' family or Apple, the documentary still manages to hit many emotional points, especially in an tearful interview with Bob Belleville, the former director of engineering on Apple's Macintosh computer.

"The work was intense, the commitment needed to do it was intense. I lost my wife, I lost my children," Belleville says in the trailer.

"He was not that much fun most of the time, but there are those moments when suddenly he's the only person who could have ever done it."

While Jobs is praised for convincing people around him that anything was possible, Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue slammed the documentary on Twitter.

"An inaccurate and mean-spirited view of my friend. It's not a reflection of the Steve I knew," Cue wrote after its premiere at South by Southwest in March.

Cue said the best portrayal of the 56-year-old was in the novel Becoming Steve Jobs, which was released earlier this year.

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine will be released in the United States on September 4, one month ahead of Universal's film based on Walter Isaacson's bestselling 2011 biography, Steve Jobs.

Michael Fassbender will play Jobs in the star-studded film set backstage at three of the Apple co-founder's biggest product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, NeXT in 1988, and the iMac in 1998.

Kate Winslet stars as Joanna Hoffman, an original member of the Mac team, The Newsroom's Jeff Daniels stars as John Sculley, Apple's former CEO, and Seth Rogen plays Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Ashton Kutcher was the first actor to play the man synonymous with the world's largest tech company in 2013 film Jobs.

The movie bombed at the US box office, only taking $16 million, and was given a paltry review of 27 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Best portrayal is about to be released - Becoming Steve Jobs (book). Well done and first to get it right.— Eddy Cue (@cue) March 16, 2015