Review: BlackBerry (2023)

BlackBerry is the sort of film that has the veneer of a spoof. It stars popular comedic actors, Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton. It’s written and directed by and co-starring Canadian indie filmmaker Matt Johnson, who’s best known for his mockumentary Operation Avalanche. It has garish haircuts (or bald caps), funny period references to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mats Sundin, and a faux verite visual approach, with quick edits featuring a variety of camera angles, and a perpetually moving, handheld camera. It tells a tech origin story, which is basically a narrative formula at this point, about the first smartphone, made by Canadian nerds in Waterloo, Ontario. In bite-size form, BlackBerry could easily be played as an SNL video spoof, but it’s not. The sardonic elements of the film breathe new life into the film’s conventional plotting, which acts almost as a comic riff on The Social Network without the broader social commentary. It lets us see these conventions in new ways, and, more importantly, disarms us for how gripping this story actually is. It’s a rollicking, self-aware, gutsy good time and a thrilling tech procedural.

BlackBerry tells the story of the three men who ran Research in Motion (RIM), the Waterloo-based tech startup that became a corporate giant with the introduction of the BlackBerry, the world’s first smartphone. There’s Matt Johnson as Doug Fregin, RIM’s co-founder who often gets forgotten. He sports shaggy hair and a headband, holds weekly movie nights at the office, and understands that the camaraderie and geek culture of RIM are needed to make up for the missing personal lives of its employees. He’s a good technician and the heart of the company, but he’s also a goof, as Jim Balsillie always makes a point of mentioning.

Balsillie, played by Glenn Howerton, is a ruthless businessman, a shark. Howerton plays him as a dead-eyed, monomaniacal business psycho, leaning into the frightening tendencies that makes Howerton’s portrayal of Dennis on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia so hilarious. After getting fired from his VC job in one of the film’s opening scenes, Balsillie strongarms his way into becoming the co-CEO of RIM and immediately starts building the company from a shaggy startup into a tech giant. He has no interest in people, no interest in tech. He just wants to be rich enough to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and move the team to Hamilton, Ontario.

Stuck between Jim and Doug is Mike Lazaridis, played by Jay Baruchel. Mike is the other co-CEO and co-founder of RIM. He is a technical perfectionist but also socially inept, passive, and quiet. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, Jim and Mike go to pitch Bell Atlantic in New York City, but right as they’re about to pitch, Mike realizes he forgot the BlackBerry prototype in a cab and disappears. Leaving Jim hanging to pitch with all bluster and no detail, he reappears in the knick of time to wow the Bell Atlantic executives with his technical understanding and his iconic advice to type on the phone’s keypad with “both thumbs.”

Every scene is defined by the tension between these men: their incongruities in terms of personality, temperaments, and work habits. The filmmaking keeps us close to the men—in their faces, so to speak—so we can constantly watch them as they talk to each other, getting angry or motivated, depending on the scene. We never see anything of the men’s personal lives, which is key to the film’s effect. RIM is their life and the BlackBerry is their life’s work. While the three men are the central characters, the dramatic arc belongs to Mike Lazaridis. Both Doug and Jim are fixed personalities, fixed personas, the angel and the devil, respectively, on Mike’s shoulders, so to speak. Will Mike sell his soul for the success of his company? Will he betray his friends? Most egregiously, will he compromise his professional integrity and shortchange the utility of his creation?

We know the answer to all these questions, but that doesn’t dispel the tension of each moment in BlackBerry. The film is a rush. It moves at a furious pace, racing through the years and through each professional challenge for RIM as a company and Mike Lazaridis as an inventor. The film pays so much detailed attention to the specifics of each technical process, each business pitch, each mounting legal issue, that it becomes something of a procedural thriller. But it’s a thriller imbued with a comedian’s sense of timing and a knowing approach to familiar scenes. Scenes that are played as inspirational in more conventional films are played for laughs here. Other moments use the familiarity to build tension, since we know some breakthrough or failure is incoming. The approach allows the film’s familiar narrative structure to come across as more inventive and energetic and comic than we’d ever get in a run-of-the-mill professional drama.

The film also benefits from a perfect ending scene that culminates with a devastating gag that summarizes Mike’s entire professional journey. The ending gives the entire film a tragic punchline, which is fitting for a company that is as much an iconic failure as an iconic success. It’s unclear whether we’ll look back on BlackBerry with the sort of awe that The Social Network has accrued 13 years later, as, in comparison to Fincher’s masterpiece, this film is less a totalizing statement on the culture at large than an insightful portrait of a specific moment in time. Nevertheless, BlackBerry is a pleasure to watch and the best mainstream Canadian film of recent years.

8 out of 10

BlackBerry (2023, Canada)

Directed by Matt Johnson; written by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller, based on Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff; starring Glenn Howerton, Jay Baruchel, Matt Johnson, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Michelle Giroux, SungWon Cho, Mark Critch, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes.