BlackBerry
Directed by Matt Johnson
Written by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller
Starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, and Matt Johnson
Running Time: 1 hour and 59 minutes
Rated R
In theaters May 12

by Iran Hrabe, Staff Writer

It’s hard to think of a better cinematic trope than the “Rise and Fall of…” story. We’ve seen this throughout history, from the Fall of the Roman Empire to VH1’s Behind the Music. People are fascinated watching someone on the way up, but even more so watching to see how they messed it all up. Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry is one of those stories, chronicling the creation of the first mass-market smartphone and the combination of inertia and bad business practices that led to it being eaten alive by Apple when the iPhone was released. Jay Baruchel stars as BlackBerry creator Mike Lazaridis and Glenn Howerton plays the company’s ruthless co-CEO Jim Balsillie, and the resulting story is a darkly comedic trainwreck you can’t look away from. It has the hallmarks you expect from a good rags-to-riches-to-rags story, though the latter rags here are more reputational, considering all parties are still multi-millionaires.

A lot of the success here is thanks to co-writer and director Matt Johnson, who takes a story that sounds dry on the surface and you could just as well look up on Wikipedia and transforms it into a parable of capitalism as an all-consuming monster that spares nobody. Ok, all of those guys still made out with millions upon millions of dollars and are still among the richest Canadians alive, but the thing that gets eaten alive here is Lazaridis’s altruistic vision for a then science fictional idea for a new kind of cell phone. At its heart, BlackBerry is an old fashioned “Devil at the Crossroads” story in which Lazaridis sells his soul to Jim Balsillie to essentially market his vision to the people who can make the BlackBerry a reality, and the way that corporatization transforms the company into a place where a bunch of nerds hang out, talk about video games, and have regular movie nights, into one where the objective is to function exclusively as a money machine.

Johnson casts himself as Research in Motion’s–the company that created the BlackBerry–beating heart and soul Doug Fregin, which would seem self-indulgent if he didn’t absolutely nail that uber-nerd computer engineer in the early 90s vibe so perfectly. Fregin is the angel on Lazaridis’ shoulder to Balsillie’s Devil, and the push-pull between that triad is where this film’s drama comes from. It’s Pirates of Silicon Valley vs. Wall Street and it works. The overall tone of BlackBerry is, in my mind, what if The Big Short had been made for a fraction of the cost? Johnson employs a ton of handheld camera in the docudrama style, but understands that the story is just a way to dig into these characters. 

So it’s important that his two leads can do 90% of the movie’s heavy-lifting, and Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton are lights out here. They are the engine that makes this thing run, and deliver the sort of performances where you’re like, “I’ll just throw this on for 30 minutes to see what it’s all about” and before you know it the credits are rolling and you’re in the “Where Are They Now” portion of the docudrama. Baruchel has been pigeonholed as a bumbling nerd for most of his career, but his Mike Lazaridis is the nerd to end all nerds. Lazaridis is one of those guys who is a computer wizard who is stuck because he has a total inability to communicate his ideas in a way that the guys in the skyscrapers will understand. 

This leads us to Glenn Howerton’s Jim Balsillie who we immediately learn is a total asshole. The kind of ambitious businessman who is so obsessed with success who he has lost all touch with reality. Howerton’s breakout work as Dennis Reynolds on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia always made him feel like the member of the Gang who might win an Oscar someday just by virtue of how locked in he is to that character. I’m happy A.P. Bio did as well as it did before getting canceled, but his dramatic work here should act as a bat signal to casting agents everywhere. Howerton takes a character who is essentially a black hole of a person and fleshes him out via little details in such a way that almost makes him a tragic figure. Part of that is Johnson and Miller’s sneaky-great script, but a lot of it is Howerton channeling a very specific kind of darkness. The darkness that has you going into the barber and saying, “One male pattern baldness, please.” 

One of the things that makes BlackBerry special is that it is unapologetically Canadian. Baruchel always turbocharges the Canadianness, but there are so many little idiosyncrasies that separates this movie from your average tale of corporate greed and misery. Johnson always leavens every moment of discomfort with a perfectly placed quip (“You give that guy too much credit man. He hasn’t seen Star Wars. He’s bald,” was one of my personal favorites). That’s important in a movie that glosses over all of BlackBerry’s successes and focuses almost entirely on the company in crisis. It could be a tense and self-serious portrait of a company self-destructing, but the movie is so damn funny, and the performances are so damn good, that it’s hard to call this anything other than pure entertainment.