The biopic “BlackBerry” is the story of the rise and fall of the BlackBerry smartphone and its titular company, without which you would not be reading this review on your iPhone or Android phone.
It’s 1996, and the geek-flag-flying co-founder of Canadian-based company Research In Motion (RIM), Doug Fregin (played by director Matt Johnson), and his beyond-nebbishy best buddy, tech wizard and co-founding entrepreneur Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), are in trouble regarding their company.
Which is why they’re preparing a cringe-y, abundantly nerd-rich sales pitch in the office of one Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), about why he should invest in their tech product phone-thingie. It’s a concept that’s far more wishful thinking than reality based.
It definitely sounds like a pie-in-the-sky gizmo to the ruthless, mean, Harvard grad Balsillie, with his shiny, predatory baldness, who thinks that these two geeks are idiots. (He’s not wrong.) Balsillie is more preoccupied at the moment with lying and cheating his way to a promotion at his current company (and subsequently getting booted).
BlackBerry
Due to Mike’s tech prowess, RIM creates something that the world hadn’t seen before—a phone with a full-fledged keyboard on it, providing quick, secure email and texting capabilities, to be used while on the go, with no added cost to users. And thus the BlackBerry, purporting itself to be the first smartphone, is born.The winning combination of Mike’s expert engineering and Jim’s laser-like, indefatigable business savvy grows RIM from a tiny group of “Revenge-of-the-nerds” über-geeks who play Doom together on LAN and who live for movie night—into a billion-dollar company.
There are banner years of excessive success. They poach top engineers from Google, Sony, and other cutting-edge companies (and they do it illegally). They put models in fancy suits in restaurants, talking loudly on their BlackBerrys and looking like the exclusive, cool, in-crowd types who own a tech advantage and who generate instantaneous, virulent covetousness in all who see them. They scuttle a hostile takeover by competitor PalmPilot’s CEO Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes).
A Big Battle of Small Phones
“BlackBerry” lends itself well to an underdog story, and works hard to get us to root for its success. In telling that story, the film vacillates between broad bromance comedy and intimate character study, especially of the two very different BlackBerry CEOs for whom the small, black piece of plastic functions as Icarus’s wings and flies them both too close to the sun. And plastic, like wax, melts.Fregin and Lazaridis’s friendship, on the other hand, doesn’t quite work as a narrative pillar. Doug’s motor-mouthed, confrontational, overprotective bluster often functions as a self-aggrandizing roadblock to both his company and his best bud’s success, and not a real act of friendship. He’s basically constantly annoying, if amusing.
“BlackBerry” is not a Social Network-style dramedy, wherein the friendship-turned-business relationship of the tech geniuses in question is a slo-mo emotional and professional train wreck. Johnson’s performance has more of a whiff of Seth Rogen or Paul Rudd in an Apatow bromance, but as mentioned—more annoying and less funny.
Regardless, the film is steady and engrossing. The foregone conclusion of where RIM and BlackBerry end up remains tense, thrilling, and slightly tragic, with Balsillie and Lazaridis giving in to their worst impulses, as many fast-ascending businessmen will do.
Pride can get the best of the most creative nerds as easily as it can the ruthless sharks, and so “BlackBerry” is as much about self-immolation as it is deterioration of relationships at the hands of hubris. It’s this tragedy at the heart of it that makes it more interesting than simply another entry in the growing tech-company biopic genre. The overarching message of “BlackBerry,” in the end, feels like a warning signal and a wake-up call to the tech business captains of industry.
