‘BlackBerry’ Review: A Rollicking Tech-World Satire

Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry commences on a somewhat high-minded note, with a 1964 clip of Arthur C. Clarke predicting how telecommunication breakthroughs would allow us to be in instant contact with each other and make physical distance irrelevant to work. As such, one might assume that this adaptation of Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry is going to tell a story of genius and hubris. But rather than the somewhat awestruck, if superficially critical, treatment of tech titans in Jobs and The Social Network, Johnson deflates the personalities involved in the vein of Mike Judge and Judd Apatow.

Johnson’s rollicking comedy starts cutting its characters down to human size right off the bat. On that front, it helps that BlackBerry is set in the historically accurate and modest setting of Hamilton, Ontario—Toronto’s less sexy neighbor—rather than an innovation hub like Silicon Valley or an Ivy League school filled with people with grand dreams of their place in history. Research in Motion (RIM) founders Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) first appear as gangly geeks making a hilariously awful pitch to manufacturing executive Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) in 1996. Initially dismissive, Jim soon realizes how revolutionary their idea was for a phone that also functioned as a handheld computer.

None of BlackBerry’s three major characters have the halo of genius: Mike shows some astounding insights but is limited by perfectionism, Jim has the morals of a shark and seems to care more about hockey and berating people than creating a great company, while Doug largely functions as RIM’s morale booster and movie-night coordinator. Still, the combination of Jim’s predatory drive and salesmanship with Mike’s deft engineering skills lead to the creation of the BlackBerry and essentially the entire smartphone market, the latter being a point that a more pathetic and outmatched Mike tries to remind people of years later.

Though Johnson infuses the film with an appreciation of the BlackBerry’s revolutionary technology—inserting a look of astonishment from a telecom executive (Saul Rubinek) when Mike explains how RIM’s technology gets around the issues that blocked larger companies from inventing their own version of the BlackBerry—he doesn’t let it stifle the story. BlackBerry is more immersed in how its poorly matched three main characters clash and bang up against each other as they hurtle toward a success which they understand as little as the failure that follows.

Johnson’s attention to the specifics of early-internet dot-com culture is most vividly on display early on. The nerdy 1990s callouts (Star Trek message boards, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and the characters’ DIY hacker ethos (such as the way they solder together cheap toy-store electronics to make their first BlackBerry prototype) bump up against the demands of working with grown-ups who wear suits and cut deals with AT&T. While the music cues are evocative of the period, they can feel a little leftfield: It’s great to hear Slint’s “Good Morning Captain,” but you may be left wondering how often it was heard from a New York cabbie’s radio.

The film’s second act jumps to 2003, where BlackBerry is the reigning smartphone and the only limit to RIM’s growth is factory capacity. Doug is now a Peter Pan figure, a hyperactive, thin-skinned class clown occupying the middle between Mike and Jeff’s increasingly solipsistic obsessiveness. While Mike futzes with the tech and Jim schemes ways to grow revenue without telling anybody what he’s up to, Doug is either trying to save the company’s soul or keep it from growing up. And when the third-act fall comes, it’s through no shortage of hubris.

Apple’s launch of the iPhone in 2007 is presented as a dinosaur-killing meteor. Everyone seems to see the end coming except Mike, now transformed from pocket-protector-wearing dork to slim-suited, well-coifed tech guru, and Jim, whose larcenous side and mania for hockey (disturbingly intense, even for a Canadian) has only grown with his salary.

The cast’s respective strengths keep the third act from feeling like a wallow, particularly the absurdity of Howerton’s blistering rage—highly similar to his It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s character’s sociopathy—and Johnson’s surprising skill as comedic wild card, maintaining an innocent and easily wounded core that keeps the performance from coming off like a Xerox of T.J. Miller’s work on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Many of the smaller roles are also well-cast, including a surprising showing from Michael Ironside as Purdy, a chief operating officer whose demeanor is that of a drill instructor with a migraine.

By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was. The film wins big by going small.