BlackBerry review: biting tech-world satire

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

Scooch over, The Social Network (2010). Budge up, Steve Jobs (2015). Make a little room for rise-and-fall comedy BlackBerry, Canadian actor/writer/director Matt Johnson’s hugely entertaining, boisterously bittersweet addition to the tech-hubris true-story genre. Following the surging then crashing fortunes of the eponymous palm-sized pocket device, and the seesawing egos of the men behind it, it’s a movie that turns the constraints of low-budget filmmaking to its thematic advantage – mirroring not just the scrappy, velcro-wallet ethos of the buddies-in-a-garage startup, but the shaky-cam aesthetic of workplace mockumentary The Office, which, across its UK and US versions, was airing right around the time of the events depicted. Seldom has history so recent been made to feel so poignantly, pointedly ancient.

A white-haired Jay Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, the nervy, asocial engineering prodigy who, besting all the other whiz-nerds attempting to put email onto a mobile phone, found a way to make it viable. Chugging into a drab parking lot in a crappy car with his affable, headbanded best friend and co-founder Douglas Fregin (Johnson himself, who co-wrote the film with Matthew Miller) and an armful of presentation boards, their arrival is swiftly upstaged by ruthless corporate climber Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) pulling up in his BMW. Then a limo full of dark-suited money guys rolls in after, a reminder that in capitalism, there’s always someone higher up the food chain. Small fry meet big fish meet great white.

Balsillie is unimpressed by Mike and Doug’s pitch, but after a gambit that gets him fired, he changes his mind and hectors his way into a co-CEO position with their fledging outfit. For a time, a successful equilibrium is achieved, with Mike’s genius, Jim’s cutthroat ambition and Doug’s morale-boosting goofball energy complementing each other to set up BlackBerry – spontaneously named, it’s implied here, for a stain on Mike’s shirt – for sudden, game-changing success. Then comes the fall. Jim goes nuts with power and private jets. Doug gets quietly sidelined. And Mike, morphing into a slick, mean Draco Malfoy type, ends up compromising on the perfectionism that did make BlackBerry, for a short time, “the world’s best telephone”. That delusion dies in an instant: in a scene in which BlackBerry employees watch a mounted TV showing Steve Jobs’s presentation of the first-generation iPhone, they look like lumbering dinosaurs wondering what that bright spot in the sky could be.

Baruchel and Johnson are good; Howerton, borderline unrecognisable (physically, if not spiritually) from his It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-) persona, is outstanding. His Jim Balsillie is a figure ripped from a Greek tragedy and plunked down in Waterloo, Ontario, a man of titanic ego, extravagant pettiness and male-pattern baldness, who holds legendary grudges and has a penchant for beating telephones to death in fits of uncontrollable rage. People like him should never gain power, so his downfall is as satisfyingly ironic as anything Sophocles could have dreamt up. And there’s a single reaction, when he’s finally defeated by the very monster he created in his own image, that is genuinely inspired: he smiles. It’s almost as if he’s proud, and it’s somehow more ghastly than any tantrum, the rictus of a serial killer obscurely relieved to have finally been caught.

BlackBerry is very funny, but there is also something sad and almost profound in its neat encapsulation of the dizzying speed at which modern culture can change. And while, from our lofty point in the future, it’s a kick to observe the stuff of 20 years ago – the Blockbuster DVDs and millennium-era fashions, the unquestioned industry maleness and buzzing intercoms – treated like artefacts excavated from the dig site of a lost civilisation, it is also gently sobering. The movie mines comedy from the human tendency to believe that we’re living in the most advanced moment possible. But while even those of us who lived through its reign as adults can now chuckle at the BlackBerry, its mayfly existence also reminds us to look around our lives today and wonder, suspiciously, just which of our current obsessions will look absurdly quaint by the day after tomorrow. Nothing is forever and nothing is safe from the rapacious jaws of progress, if “CrackBerry” can become “BlackBuried” and the must-have gizmo of the moment can become the punchline to a dad joke in the blink of an eye, or the click of a tiny keyboard.