Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out our Independent Film Festival Boston coverage, from this year to past festivals.
It’s a tale as old as personal computing: A group of nerds have a great idea but lack business acumen, so they warily partner up with a corporate type and somehow bring their genius invention to market. From here, this goes a few different ways, though we’re mostly concerned with two. In the first scenario, it’s a massive success and stays that way despite meager adversity, forever altering its founders in ways both transformative and reductive (The Social Network, Steve Jobs). In the other, the invention’s a fraud or poorly managed, shareholders revolt, the government steps in, and a few people go to prison even though most get off scot-free (basically every limited series about a tech company released in the last five or so years). Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry is a synthesis of these two plots, depicting the rise and fall of the first smartphone maker, whose contributions to our digital present are obscured by Jony Ive designs and smoke from an exploded Galaxy Note7 as much as their own mismanagement and resistance to change. What separates Johnson’s film from the pack, or at least from Aaron Sorkin’s contributions to the genre, is that BlackBerry is willing to treat the entire ordeal as farce: Tell a would-be tragedy enough times and eventually the humor emerges.
BlackBerry, more than anything else, is the tale of three competing dreams. First is that of Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), a nebbishy inventor with a crippling shyness and a genius-level engineering intellect, who wants to make a device that will, essentially, revolutionize personal computing. As the founder of Research in Motion, a Canadian electronics company, he’s had limited success — there’s a large deal with US Robotics that he’s having trouble closing — and he’s run into problems that most dreamer-founders have: he doesn’t know too much about business. Enter Jim Basillie (played to perfection by Glenn Howerton), a rough-and-gruff CEO-in-the-making who saw RIM’s pitch for their product and saw its worth. His brash ways have left him jobless, and he offers to come on board to help them shape up, even if it means he won’t have as much job security, spare cash, or time to watch hockey as he might have hoped. His dream is to eventually move away from business and devote his time to Canada’s national pastime, and RIM is his only way forward.
What he discovers is a business in chaos, one step above the “Mom’s Garage” level on the start-up path to success. The office, full of the staples of nerdery – toys on the desk, Star Wars posters on the walls, a VCR and TV ready for impromptu movie nights — is led by vice-president Doug Fregin (Johnson), a dyed-in-the-wool geek who looks the part and acts it to perfection. He’s immediately skeptical of Jim when he arrives at the office and starts barking orders because it threatens his dream: To work at a company in which he feels like he’s not actually doing any work, and if he is, it’s for the betterment of all mankind. But Jim’s approach to things — schedule the meeting first, and then show off the product — produces some results, and thanks to Mike’s skill, RIM manages to wow their first group of potential investors (even if he almost lost the prototype in the taxi on the way over). You know the rest: RIM — later named BlackBerry after their flagship product — would go on to change our relationship to technology, before collapsing in a spectacular fashion following the release of the iPhone and the revelation of all of Jim’s machinations.
What’s particularly cool about Johnson’s approach to this tale is how his sets are subtly reactive. The transition from RIM’s first office, a hovel over a Shoppers Drug Mart in Waterloo, to the indulgent-yet-austere BlackBerry R&D lab (part of a whole complex devoted to the company’s functions, including executive offices and a giant space for the salesmen) is obvious, but there are little things along the way that make a big difference. Movie posters disappear off the walls, replaced by your standard corporate in-house mementos and motivational slogans. Desks empty themselves of personality. The faces in the office change: most have left by the time the company collapses, but those who do dress better. By the end, the only one unchanged is Doug, still sporting his goofy wireframes and headband, even as Mike has slowly morphed into a creature resembling Jim, with a polished coif and an expensive suit, power mitigating the shy stutter he once had. He’s the last of the true believers — he’s stunned to pick up the phone and find the SEC on the other end of the line, but pushes it off as a prank — and his disappointment mirrors our own.
Every bad choice that the company made came from the same place: The abandonment of long-held principles in favor of short-term profit. To his credit, Johnson provides some manner of sympathy even for his would-be villain, with the revelation of the why behind Balsille’s stock-pumping being so pitiably human that it’s almost enough to forgive him wanting to relocate the Penguins to small-market Canada. It’s a weirdly big-hearted film, though it regards its characters with clear eyes, with their folly serving to make them more well-rounded dimensionally than one might expect.
In a strange way, BlackBerry the film feels a whole lot like BlackBerry the company, at least before the fall. It’s a comparatively shoestring production when placed side-by-side with something like Fincher or Boyle’s films, to say nothing of the endless parade of con-of-the-week dramatizations on your average streaming service. Yet it’s better than most of them, with only a few directorial and technological slight-of-hands standing from it and the par set by The Social Network (which, for my money, remains absurdly prescient in its cultural diagnoses) because of how well it understands its characters, each of whom has an analogous mirror in the process of film production itself. But it also, importantly, understands the necessity of an ending — it’s why, despite its complexity, Ben Affleck’s Air can be read as simple hagiography rather than the insightful exploration of athlete exploitation that it is. There is comfort and caution in the fall. If Icarus’s wings had held up to the sun’s scrutiny, well, the ancient Greeks, at least in myth, would have all been flying around with waxy feathers on their arms. But in his bone-shattering plunge from the tops of the course all the way down to the craggy Earth, his parable reminds us of the limits of ambition. If only there were a golden parachute (or a giant pile of unboxed BlackBerry Storms) to guide his descent.