The BlackBerry was a constant in the lives of many people around the globe from the mid-90s until about 2008. The fact that it’s all but disappeared in today’s marketplace is astounding. The fact that everyone in my theater immediately pulled out their iPhones when this movie was done to check their texts or emails or whatever, is an interesting note to end the movie on. And it proves BlackBerry’s point so well.

Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Douglas Fregin (Matt Johnson) are two tech nerds back in 1996 who made a deal with a software company that screwed them over, and they dream of developing a cell phone that can also do emails and text messages. They make the proverbial deal with the devil, Jim Balsillie (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton) a recently fired CEO who also puts up a significant amount of his own money in the interest of what becomes the BlackBerry. However, when there is a rise, there is a fall, or in this case, when first comes the BlackBerry, then comes the iPhone.

I never had a BlackBerry. It just wasn’t marketed towards me when I was younger. It was for businesspeople. My mom had one for work, I think. I haven’t thought about the BlackBerry brand since the late 00’s, when the last thought I gave to it was ‘what ever happened to the BlackBerry?’ And then I didn’t care enough to check my iPhone (ha-ha) for a news article about it. And while I really enjoyed Ben Affleck’s recent film AIR, about the creation and unlikely success of the Air Jordan shoe, this kind of feels like the anti-AIR, in many ways, because we’re dealing with a product once beloved, now fallen so deep into anonymity, today’s young people don’t even remember the BlackBerry. And that offers a really compelling approach for storytelling.

Directed by and co-starring Matt Johnson, BlackBerry is an extremely Canadian production that details the rise and fall of the eponymous smartphone brand with sobering insight and grim detail. Glenn Howerton (almost unrecognizable with a bald cap) is giving the best performance I’ve ever seen from him as a villainous monstrous CEO type. Johnson himself, is excellent as the heart of this movie, as the audience conduit into this weird, malicious backstabbing world. Jay Baruchel is also giving a career best performance as Mike Lazaridis, whose story feels like Shakespearean tragedy for the tech era.

It starts out a little hacky, filmed like The Office, mockumentary style, and the very Canadian humor is hit or miss in the beginning. But once we settle into this story and you see how much of it there is to be told, it is downright fascinating. And mean, and deeply brutal in how all this went down. We aren’t meant to believe everything that happens in this story is exactly what happened, but it doesn’t feel like a lot is happening simply for dramatic effect. It starts off a little slow and weak but once you get through the first 30 minutes or so, the film does a great job at strapping you in for the ride of this legendary failure.

You ultimately do end up feeling sympathy for these characters, almost all of whom do something awful at one point or another in the story. BlackBerry is a sharp, biting and wildly entertaining look at a company that almost got it right, but in doing so got it wrong in every way imaginable. It feels like an important docudrama – an important slice of history but part of what makes this enjoyable is it’s taking itself a lot less seriously than films like AIR or The Social Network. Everything has a satirical bite to it, and a bit of side-eye, and that kind of self-awareness sets BlackBerry apart from the pack.  

Sent from my iPhone.