The opening sequences of Pirates of Silicon Valley take place in garages and dormitory rooms, among young men writing code on machines almost no one had heard of. What the film establishes early — quietly, before any of the boardroom scenes arrive — is the frame it will keep for everything that follows: not technology as liberation, but as territory. Something to be seized, held, and defended.

Martyn Burke wrote and directed the film for TNT, adapting Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine’s book about the personal computer’s origins. The structure runs in two parallel tracks — Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen building Microsoft — and moves across roughly two and a half decades of the industry’s foundational period.

Noah Wyle’s Steve Jobs is the film’s most charged performance. Wyle catches the restless quality of someone who needed every room to arrange itself around him, and the scenes where Jobs browbeats collaborators or redirects credit carry a low-grade menace that keeps the film from tipping into reverence. Joey Slotnick’s Steve Wozniak serves as a useful counterweight — the engineer who wanted to build, not to dominate. Anthony Michael Hall’s Bill Gates is more careful, less theatrical: a portrait of watchfulness rather than charisma.

As television filmmaking goes, Pirates of Silicon Valley is modest in scale but precise in what it chooses to dramatize. Burke is more interested in the psychology of accumulation than in the mechanics of invention — the film lingers on deals, on what each side borrowed and did not credit, on the specific kind of hunger that drives someone to build a billion-dollar company out of someone else’s idea.

The film cannot decide how seriously to take its own thesis. It presents Apple’s debt to the Xerox PARC interface and Microsoft’s borrowings from IBM without fully pressing the question of what, if anything, counts as original thought in a young industry. The piracy in the title is offered more as a badge of honor than as a genuine charge — which softens the edge just enough to let both men off a hook the film had spent ninety minutes setting.

There is a scene near the end where Jobs watches Gates deliver a presentation and recognizes the move he himself had run earlier. It is the film’s most honest moment — a beat about imitation catching itself in the act — and the film does not quite know what to do with it. Neither does anyone who has thought seriously about these two companies for very long.