BlackBerry (2023)
dir. Matt Johnson
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Elevation Pictures
The most fascinating thing that happens during a screening of BlackBerry comes seconds after the closing credits start. That’s when everyone in the audience picks up the little $1000 computer that we all carry around with us, so we can check what’s come in while we were busy staring at a different screen for a few hours. This strictly observed ritual takes place millions of times in movie theaters across the country each year. I’m sorry to say there are plenty of people who simply can’t wait until the movie is over before worshipping at the altar of their personalized mobile device.
What makes this now-common act of servility to technology something of note when considering BlackBerry is that the audience has only seconds ago seen a story integral to explaining how things got this way. BlackBerry tells the story of, as one character in the movie puts it, the phone everybody had before they got an iPhone. Director Matt Johnson and his wonderful cast frame this story as a goofy comedy, at least until the pathos kicks in and things get unexpectedly poignant.
The movie begins in 1996, as Research in Motion (RiM) partners Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin prepare to deliver a pitch for their new invention, the PocketLink. At least, they think that’s what they want to call it. The man they’re pitching to, Jim Balsillie, tells them it’s a terrible name. He also tells them that the company he works for can’t help them. What they need, he says, is a venture capital firm.
Balsillie is a little distracted, though. His company is going through an acquisition, and he hopes to run his restructured division if the sale goes through. To shore up his prospects, Balsillie ruthlessly swipes a tax strategy presentation prepared at the last minute by a coworker and delivers it as his own work during an acquisition negotiation meeting. His duplicity gets him fired.
Now humiliated and unemployed, Balsillie calls on Research in Motion and basically strong arms Lazaridis and Fregin into hiring him as their new CEO. (Co-CEO, Doug is adamant in making clear.) RiM has a multi-million-dollar deal to produce modems for USRobotics. The problem is they haven’t gotten paid yet. Jim’s ruthless business acumen proves dead on when he predicts that USR – whom he calls pirates – has pulled a fast one on Mike and Doug, and that the company never intends to pay RiM for their order.
These computer nerds need a shark on their team to scare the pirates and deliver their idea of a cell phone that also does email to the market. The stakes become life-or-death for the little company when Jim discovers that USR is already working on their own version of an email-capable phone.
Canadian actor/director Matt Johnson’s approach to the material is to play this oddball assortment of characters for all the laughs he can get. Johnson – who cowrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Matthew Miller – has previously worked on low-budget, indie projects like The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. He also co-created a mockumentary web series (which later moved to television) called Nirvanna the Band the Show.
Set in Waterloo, Ontario, where the real-life Research in Motion was based, BlackBerry is a family affair from our neighbors to the north. The BlackBerry is a Canadian invention. Its story is told by Canadian filmmakers and it stars Canadian entertainment royalty in the lead. Actor, comedian, and filmmaker Jay Baruchel brings a quirky sensibility to the role of RiM cofounder Mike Lazaridis.
Part of the reason I fell so hard for BlackBerry is because I lived through the unbelievable tech innovations of the time period it depicts. We had no idea of knowing it at the time, but the arrival of the BlackBerry phone presaged an unimaginable revolution in the way people communicate and interact with each other and the internet.
Johnson opens his film with an interview clip from inventor, futurist, and science fiction writer (and a personal hero of mine) Arthur C. Clarke. In the clip, Clarke, speaking probably 50 or more years ago, waxes philosophical about how coming innovations in telecommunications technology will revolutionize the way humans live and work. We will no longer commute, he pronounces, we will, instead, communicate. Clarke had no way of knowing the reality of his predictions would be full of human messiness and hilarity.
To be fair, the principal players probably wouldn’t remember the laughs either. By at least one account – Johnson’s – the source material for the movie, a book titled Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry is a dry and technical read. The movie goes out of its way to underscore that while this is a true story, what we are seeing is merely “based” on that story.
Through his unique comedic sensibility and clear adoration for pop culture, Matt Johnson crafts a shaggy-(under)dog story that feels loose and improvisational in style. It’s biopic by way of goofy workplace sitcom. The director even folds in aspects of internet and meme culture – which wouldn’t have flourished in quite the same way without the instant connectivity of the smartphones that the original BlackBerry gave rise to – that have no obvious connection to the story, to hilarious effect.
A perfect example of this is what I’m referring to as the “I’m from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!” scene. Johnson and Miller crib a bonkers line from a viral internet video – one that I, as a not-very-online-human, would never have known about had I not seen BlackBerry – and drop it, to genius comedic effect, into a scene that is otherwise one of the most dramatic and tense of the entire picture.
The viral video is a man-on-the-street style interview that goes wildly off the rails. The playfulness of meme internet culture is incorporated into the movie seamlessly; it’s a big laugh, but you would never know where it came from unless you’re extremely online, or you like to dig for answers when a line like that from a movie makes you curious (AKA me).
Johnson and his set design team also recreate the past with wonderful fidelity. BlackBerry takes place over the course of ten or so years, from 1996 to 2007ish. The sheer volume of pop culture artifacts from that period on display in the movie is a wonder to behold. The goofier of the two original RiM cofounders, Doug Fregin, has a t-shirt collection worthy of envy. It seems obvious that one of his favorites is his Doom video game shirt.
RiM has a sacred movie-night tradition, and at one point, we see the team watching the John Carpenter cult classic They Live. Doug turns to a RiM employee during the most famous scene in the Carpenter film and stresses that “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s character – I’ll note that Piper also hailed from Canada – was the basis for the video game character Duke Nukem. His excitement to pass this bit of pop culture information on to others is easily recognized by those of us who feel compelled to do the same any chance we get.
The cast for BlackBerry brings the story to life with a quirky, goofy sense of humor, and it starts with the director himself. Johnson not only directed and cowrote the film, he also plays Doug with a lovable awkward charm that had me smiling whenever his character appeared on screen. The character’s iconic, ever-present headband, his mid-90s-style glasses frames, and his penchant for wearing tank-tops all make Doug a guy you want to root for. Johnson plays Doug with a childlike love of entertainment and we quickly understand how in-over-his-head he is when financial moves that Jim has made, to secure top tech talent for the company, begins to raise questions.
Jay Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis as an aloof wunderkind. The idea for the world’s first smartphone may have come out of Lazaridis’s head, but his lack of business sense and his singular focus on making tech gadgets work might have kept him from being recognized as the man who revolutionized human communications.
A moment in the opening minutes of the film perfectly sums up the man we’re meeting. Awaiting Jim Balsillie for the PocketLink pitch meeting, Mike notices a white noise buzz coming from Balsillie’s intercom. To Doug’s dismay, Mike pops the little box open in order to fix it. Specifics about this problem echo again and again throughout the movie, setting up the completely unexpected (by me, at least) heartbreaking finale of the film.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia co-creator and co-star Glenn Howerton owns the screen as hard-ass SOB Jim Balsillie. Capitalism reinforces some of humanity’s worst traits, but there is no arguing that the nerd collective at Research in Motion needed someone as ruthless as Balsillie to make their innovations noticed on the world stage.
Howerton perfected the hair-trigger temper tantrum on It’s Always Sunny. He transfers that comedic timing beautifully here. It’s simultaneously hilarious and chilling when, as Balsillie, Howerton screams at his new charges, “GET OFF THE FUCKING INTERNET, NERDS!” when trying to place a business call that is blocked due to their modem connection. (Kids, in the before times, in the long-long ago, you couldn’t make a phone call and be on the internet simultaneously. It was a dark time.)
Along the way, we’re treated to Cary Elwes as another business pirate at the head of a company that wants to swallow RiM whole. Perennial “that guy” character-actor Saul Rubinek turns up in a few scenes as the head of the telecom company that finally sees the genius of the PocketLink. The scene where Baruchel’s Mike Lazaridis explains to Rubinek’s character why his design can make a smartphone work is chill-inducing. Ditto that for the moment when Mike gives the Rubinek character the pro-tip of using his thumbs to type on the tiny phone keyboard. There was a time when that wasn’t second nature to us.
Warming my heart even more was seeing Canadian actor Michael Ironside as Charles, the enforcer that Jim hires to whip his team of nerds into shape. Ironside ruled the 1990s movie villain marketplace, turning in iconic performances in movies like Total Recall and Starship Troopers. And, of course, there is his unforgettable turn in David Cronenberg’s 1981 horror cult classic, Scanners. Ironside hasn’t gone anywhere – he’s worked consistently over the years – but this is the first thing I’ve seen him in for quite some time, and the character was seemingly tailor-made for the intense actor’s talents.
There have been grumblings – especially when considered alongside this year’s Tetris and Air – that BlackBerry is simply “another corporate biopic.” Believe me, as an anticapitalist, I get it. But context is always key. Yes, these movies are a way to burnish the otherwise corroding reputations of corporations – and, specifically for BlackBerry, the destructive force of tech companies in particular – but Johnson has centered his story around ostensible outsiders worth rooting for. His film is surprisingly touching and damn funny. It tells the story of a device that has, for ill or good, reshaped the world in its own image.
Why it got 4 stars:
- BlackBerry is hilarious and features a great performance around every corner. Matt Johnson took an idea that could have been a standard (and probably very boring) historical biopic and made it sing with his own distinct, quirky style.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Doug: “Have you ever played Wolfenstein?” Jim: Blank-ass stare tinged with frustration and anger.
- The pay phone sequence (beginning with Mike answering his phone and hearing: “Will you accept a collect call from ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON DOWN THERE?!?’) is hysterical.
- Perhaps the best moment in the movie, though, is Charles yelling at his new charges to get work done as quickly as possible. I’ll have to paraphrase, but it was something along the lines of, “You’re children. When I’m done with you, you will be men, not little boys playing with their little penises.” Johnson then holds on the lone woman in the room, looking extremely uncomfortable.
- There are numerous excellent needle drops throughout the movie.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I’ve seen BlackBerry three times at this point. The first was at SXSW, where the crowd was into it and Matt Johnson was in attendance for a Q&A. (BTW, he’s a hoot. Ask me some time to recount my favorite moment of that Q&A).
- I then took two different groups of friends to see it, once during my coverage of DIFF and then at a normal screening. In the eight+ years I’ve been writing about movies, this is the first title I felt on-fire about so much that I wanted to proselytize to anyone who would listen.
- During the third screening, there was a gentleman in the audience who loudly chimed in to explain the tech of certain scenes. It was an amazing addition to the movie, because he was so earnest about each interjection.
- BlackBerry opened in theaters on the 12th of May. It hasn’t done great numbers, but you can still find it in a few theaters. According to the internet, Hulu has a longstanding deal with IFC Films, which owns the US distribution rights for BlackBerry, so keep your eyes peeled for it to show up on that service eventually.