The dramatised behind-the-scenes story of the rise and demise of the company that had the world where its customers had its little black phone – in the palm of its hand – BlackBerry is so well designed, tooled and assembled that it could be used as a case study for how to make a film about something potentially as uninspiring as developer code.
Things kick off in the mid 1990s with two dudes – tech dweeb Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and tech schlub Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) – getting absolutely nowhere pitching what they see as the future of portable communication. Their tiny startup has worked out a way to piggyback off bits of the unused UHF spectrum and this, allied to the dinky keyboard on the phone they’ve designed, plus some fine encryption, means their new phone will be fast, versatile and, most important of all, cheap to use. Outrageous call charges will be all in the past. If only someone with some business savvy would step up with some seed money and save these guys, not least of all from themselves.
In odd-couple style, that guy arrives in the shape of Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), a Harvard graduate with a take-no-prisoners approach who has just badassed himself out of a job at the company Mike and Doug were pitching to. Realising that the two losers who dress like surfers who don’t surf might be on to something, Jim badasses his way into their company, installs himself as Co-CEO (with Mike) and in culture-clash scenes that are both funny and cringey proceeds to turn BlackBerry from the all-dudes-together startup running on goodwill and movie-and-pizza nights into the company it would become.
It was undoubtedly all a bit more complex than it appears on screen, but director/writer Matt Johnson (the self-same guy as is playing Doug) and co-writer Matthew Miller have decided not to lets facts get in the way of a good story. They show us the way it was, then the turnaround – Jim shouting while Mike and Doug cower – and then fast-forward to the point where BlackBerry are the planet’s biggest thing in mobile comms (says the film, Nokia might disagree) in 2007, when the launch of the iPhone consigned BlackBerry to history, at the same time as the USA’s Securities and Exchange Commission arrived to investigate financial irregularities at Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s parent company.
There is enough technical stuff for us to understand that there were hurdles to overcome – jeopardy! – enough about the status appeal of the shiny phone to remind us what cachet a BlackBerry had and enough in various boardroom scenes to emphasise how different the business cultures of that era’s tech start-ups were from the blue-chip corporations they were about to obliterate. Enough, but not too much. We get it.
Brilliant casting adds to the almost strategically written screenplay (based on the factual account, Losing the Signal, by journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff). Jay Baruchel gulps away as Mike, the unwilling (co)CEO, Matt Johnson galumphs in a heroically self-effacing way as the right-hand-dude who’s going to become an increasing irrelevance once Balsillie arrives, which brings us to Glenn Howerton’s performance, a thing of foul-mouthed, explosively raging wonder that holds the entire film together. Best known for TV comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Howerton picked up a lot of nominations but very few actual gongs for what is a joyfully and entirely appropriately screen-hogging turn.
As a director Johnson does nothing to get in the way of the story and, cannily, includes the key moment in BlackBerry’s story as a company, which is a key moment in the story of another company – archive footage of Steve Jobs on stage introducing the iPhone in 2007. And suddenly BlackBerry the disruptor becomes BlackBerry the disrupted, the MySpace of comms.
BlackBerry – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
