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“BlackBerry” is a MoneyBro movie par excellence, right up there with “ Wall Street ,” “ Glengarry Glen Ross ,” “ Boiler Room ,” and “ The Wolf of Wall Street .” It shares their key, defining trait: even though its main characters are either charismatic sociopaths or sheep, and the capitalist system they operate in is deeply corrupt and rewards men without morals or conscience, the story is so excitingly told, the performances so watchable, and the dialogue so quotable that it becomes the verbal equivalent of an action flick—kinetic, suspenseful, and sometimes unexpectedly beautiful and weirdly moving. Instead of shooting, stabbing, or beating each other, or chasing each other in vehicles, characters in MoneyBro cinema insult each other, construct elaborate traps that play on insider knowledge or exploit an opponent’s weaknesses and pathologies, score vindicating promotions and huge paydays, and try to see how long they can keep a streak going before someone slaps handcuffs on them. I’ve seen colleagues insist that “BlackBerry” should be shown in business school classes as a cautionary tale, but it’s easier to imagine a group of young guys in ties putting it on after a long night of carousing and reciting the dialogue together until they pass out. It’s one of the coolest portrayals of losers doomed to be historical footnotes that you’ll ever see, with a needle-drop soundtrack so cannily chosen that every song on it will probably be used in a commercial for a Fortune 500 company within the next two years.

Directed and co-starring Matt Johnson and inspired by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff ’s business history,  Losing the Signal , “BlackBerry” is shot in a raggedy, trembling handheld style that suggests what an episode of “The Office” guest-scripted by David Mamet might have felt like. The most fascinating thing about the script, co-written by Johnson and Matthew Miller , is its structure. It shows us the beginning and end of this story but nothing else. The ellipsis in the middle gives the film a more intriguing energy than it would have had than if it had followed the standard playbook of meticulously tracking the rise and fall of a product and its makers. Imagine watching only the first and last episodes of an excellent TV drama—or the MoneyBro equivalent of “ Full Metal Jacket ,” the only war film that shows naive recruits being trained/brainwashed at the beginning of the process and their cynical, hardened-by-war, final incarnations, but skips the middle part showing how the change happened. 

The BlackBerry, of course, was the handheld device that the iPhone and its imitators wiped out of the marketplace. Part one of the movie shows how Mike Lazaridis ( Jay Baruchel ) and his partner Douglas Fregin (Johnson) created the BlackBerry and figured out how to let huge numbers of them operate on the same cellular network without crashing the system, then watched as its popularity spread, putting them on the verge of becoming tech icons in the mold of Steve Jobs . 

Like many creative geniuses, Mike and Doug lack the ruthlessness and nuts-and-bolts knowledge they need to survive and thrive in a capitalist system. They’re nerds habitually bullied by their clients, including one who owes them millions for products they already shipped and has been stringing them along for months. Enter Jim Ballsillie ( Glenn Howerton ), a domineering executive and hockey buff who feels unappreciated at his current job. He senses that the duo is on the verge of something big and offers to make their problems disappear and grow the company if they make him CEO. Doug sizes Jim up as a “shark” and is justifiably terrified of him. But Mike, who stammers and cringes his way through any call asking for money, makes Jim “co-CEO.” He thinks there’s value in hiring someone who can strike fear in the heart of anyone who might try to take advantage of them, and knows how to sense when an important moment is imminent and seize it. “You know who’s afraid of sharks? Pirates,” Mike says.

The movie sprints through the company’s rise, compressing a lot of the story into lively montages shot in the style of a Steven Soderbergh heist film (or business procedural like his “ High Flying Bird ” or “The Informant!”), often leaning into the innate ridiculousness of a scenario. (When Jim orders everyone at the company to become “male models” and be seen in public using BlackBerries no matter what activity they’re engaged in, the film cuts to a man playing tennis one-handed while using his free hand to hold a device.) There’s suspense that centers on whether the exponential increase in BlackBerry sales will overload their wireless carrier’s system and render their product unusable; the solution is ingenious. 

There’s an implied breakpoint around the middle of the movie, and then we pick up in the mid-aughts when BlackBerry is about to get memory-holed by the same era that it did so much to define. This all plays out in a way that evokes Heraclitus’s belief that character is destiny. There are no surprises, really, in how everything goes. All the key players in the story behave more or less as they behaved when we met them, but the circumstances are different, and they’ve gotten complacent and myopic and are reluctant to bend and change.

“BlackBerry” pays close attention to the details of what happened and explains important moments without being pedantic. At the same time, it treats the characters and events as elements in an art object. It’s fun to re-watch and study in hopes of noticing subtle details that escaped one’s attention the first time and draw connections between the halves. In one of Mike’s earliest personality-defining scenes, Jim tries to push him into throwing together a prototype in less time than he thinks he needs to do it properly, and Mike pushes back. Later in the film, he gives in, with terrible results. Similarly, Jim’s macho, improvisational, blustery, “If I can dream it, I can make it happen” energy that powers the company’s early success blows up in his face later. Even his fascination with hockey becomes an element in the company’s fall. 

It might be instructive to superimpose the first and second parts of the film over each other to see if certain scenes map perfectly over other scenes. I suspect it would all fit as snugly as the key setpieces in the first and second “ Star Wars ” trilogies, which are also about how the seeds of a person’s triumph or downfall are planted early in the story of their life. Many of this film's adults seem like overgrown children more often than not. Mike loves the click-click sound of the BlackBerry’s buttons so much that when the innovation of the screen-only iPhone threatens to eradicate the product, his brain has a brown-out, and when it comes back online, he’s malfunctioning. All he can do is deny the obvious.

Baruchel rose to fame playing a smart, sensitive, easily flustered teenager on TV’s “Undeclared”—what a deep bench of storytellers the Judd Apatow / Paul Feig factory produced!—and he channels some of that performance here, too, even though he’s 41 now and has dyed his hair silver to match the real Mike. He and Johnson are believable as men who have known each other a long time but have only limited influence over each other’s major decisions, especially the bad ones. 

Howerton assures himself a spot on any future list of classic scene-stealing jerks: with his shaved-bald head, narrowed eyes, and pouty lips, he’s the greatest supporting character that the young Bruce Willis never got to play. All three actors capture a quality that defined the ‘90s and aughts in both technology and finance—a self-flattering need to affect some “warrior spirit” and revel in the spectacle of destroying one’s enemies financially and virtually as if a village had been sacked and burned rather than a signature added to a document. As in satires like “ American Psycho ,” the behavior is appallingly funny, and funny because it’s appalling. This movie is about people whose successes and failures originate in the same place: a tragedy shot and edited like an action comedy.

In theaters now.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

BlackBerry (2023)

Rated R for language throughout.

121 minutes

Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis

Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie

Matt Johnson as Doug

Michael Ironside as Purdy

Rich Sommer as Paul

Cary Elwes as Yankowski

Saul Rubinek as Woodman

Martin Donovan

SungWon Cho as Ritchie

Michelle Giroux as Dara

Mark Critch as Bettman

Ben Petrie as Allan

Ethan Eng as Ethan

• Matt Johnson

Writer (based on the book by)

• Jacquie McNish
• Sean Silcoff
• Matthew Miller

Cinematographer

• Jay McCarrol

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‘BlackBerry’ Review: Big Dreams, Little Keyboards

The struggle to sell a revolutionary gizmo fractures a friendship in this lively, bittersweet comedy.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

In Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” — a wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, Johnson and his co-writer, Matthew Miller (adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” ), have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.

That blend of patter and pathos was also evident in Johnson’s previous feature, “Operation Avalanche” (2016) , as was an intrepid filming style that effortlessly conjures the rush of innovation. This time, we’re in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1996, where Mike Lazaridis (a perfect Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) — best friends and co-founders of a small tech company called Research in Motion (RIM) — are trying to sell a product they call PocketLink, a revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device and pager. While waiting to pitch a roomful of suits, Mike is distracted by an annoyingly buzzing intercom. Grabbing a paper clip, he quickly fixes it, noting that it was made in China. Disgust flits across his face, an expression we will remember when, much later, mounting problems force him to embrace a manufacturing option he despises.

Clever callbacks like this allow “BlackBerry” to hauntingly connect the story’s downward slide with the innocence and optimism of its early scenes. The corporate types don’t understand Mike and Doug’s invention, but a predatory salesman named Jim Balsillie (a fantastic Glenn Howerton), gets it. Recently fired and fired up, Jim sees the device’s potential, making a deal to acquire part of RIM in exchange for cash and expertise. Doug, a man-child invariably accessorized with a headband and a bewildered look, is doubtful; Mike, assisted by a shock of prematurely gray hair, is wiser. He knows that they’ll need an intermediary to succeed.

Reveling in a vibe — hopeful, testy, undisciplined — that’s an ideal match for its subject, “BlackBerry” finds much of its humor in Jim’s resolve to fashion productive employees from RIM’s ebulliently geeky staff, who look and act like middle schoolers and converse in a hybrid of tech-speak and movie quotes. It’s all Vogon poetry to Jim; but as Jared Raab’s restless camera careens around the chaotic work space, the excitement of disruption and the thrill of creation become tangible. It helps that the director is more than familiar with the feel of a friend-filled workplace: It’s how he’s been making movies since his first feature, “The Dirties,” in 2013.

Fortified with strong actors in small roles — Michael Ironside as a pit bull C.O.O., Martin Donovan as the boss who sees the peril in Jim’s ruthlessness — “BlackBerry” remains grounded when the money rolls in and übergeeks from Google are enticed by multimillion-dollar offers. Some of the financial machinations, like Jim’s frantic attempts to fend off a hostile takeover by Palm Pilot, are less than clear; but “BlackBerry” isn’t just the story of a life-altering gadget. Long before that gadget’s death knell sounds in the unveiling of the iPhone, Jim has so thoroughly insinuated himself between the two friends that an image of a forgotten Doug, gazing down from a window as Jim and Mike head off to a meeting, is almost heartbreaking.

More than anything, perhaps, “BlackBerry” highlights the vulnerability and exploitability of creatives in a cutthroat marketplace. The push-pull between genius and business, and their mutual dependence (brilliantly articulated during Jim and Mike’s sales pitch to a wireless provider), is the movie’s real subject and the wellspring of its persistent yearning tone. “When you grow up, your heart dies,” Doug says at one point, quoting “The Breakfast Club.” The sad sweetness of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” played over the end credits, is just the cherry on top.

“The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world,” a shop teacher once told Mike. He was right; and if “BlackBerry” has a flaw, it’s perhaps in neglecting to trumpet the momentousness of that change, one that has made it seem we will all be typing with our thumbs forever.

BlackBerry Rated R for “Glengarry Glen Ross” language and “Silicon Valley” fashion. Running time: 2 hour 2 minutes. In theaters.

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John Semley

BlackBerry Is a Movie That Portrays Tech Dreams Honestly—Finally

It’s quaint, looking back on it now, but in the decade before  iPhones ,  Androids , and  Samsung Galaxies ,  BlackBerry was  the smartphone. It was dubbed the “CrackBerry,” because of the seemingly addictive hold the sleek gizmo, with its satisfyingly clicky keyboard buttons, had on the market. Kim Kardashian was glued to hers. Barack Obama ran the free world from his. And its famously secure messaging client helped international drug rings conduct businesses across the globe.

Now, it’s a relic. An also-ran. Or, as one character puts it in  BlackBerry , a new movie about the early smartphone empire’s rise and fall, it’s merely “the thing people used before they used the iPhone.” But as this fresh, thoughtful comedy makes plain, BlackBerry is more than just a bleak cautionary tale. It’s a story of how tech culture, as we know it today, took root, bloomed, and died on the vine.

The movie opens with a telling title card: “The following fictionalization is inspired by real people and real events that took place in Waterloo, Ontario.” Matt Johnson, the film’s director and cowriter, shrugs it off as “a prefix designed by our lawyers.” But beyond ensuring artistic license, it also situates the film, squarely, in a sleepy town about an hour and half from Toronto. 

Before the super successful BlackBerry and its parent company, Research in Motion, revamped the region as an aspiring tech hub, Waterloo and its environs were better known for their lively farmer’s market culture and Mennonites in horse-drawn buggies.

What  BlackBerry  captures is the period that disrupted that, a short-lived  rumpsringa  in the late '90s and early aughts when the future of tech and telecommunications felt truly global. It was a period when  anywhere  could be the next Silicon Valley. In this sense, the titular gadget—which promised palm-of-your-hand connectivity across the globe—is, quite literally, a structuring device.

Loosely based on the 2016 book  Losing the Signal ,  BlackBerry  seems at first blush like a familiar,  Social Network -style drama of a company’s explosive rise. Nebbish engineer Mike Lazaridis ( This Is the End ’s Jay Baruchel) teams up with Jim Balsillie ( It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ’s Glenn Howerton), a menacing Harvard MBA. It’s a marriage of mutual convenience, undergirded by a more Faustian logic.

With Lazaridis’ ability to exploit existing wireless infrastructure, and Balsillie’s command of boardroom politics, the pair invent, and cannily market, the modern smartphone. In one funny montage, Howerton’s Balsillie recasts his sales force (“Dead-eyed dumb fucks,” as he calls them) as actors, dispatching them to fancy restaurants and private clubs to talk loudly on their BlackBerrys, in an effort to call attention to the device. “It’s not a cell phone,” he insists. “It’s a status symbol.” 

Where Balsillie is eager to exploit the device’s appeal to a class of go-go C-suite dicks—and backdate employment contracts, and play cat-and-mouse with the SEC, and generally overpromise and underdeliver—Lazaridis is more preoccupied with the nuts-and-bolts of obsessively engineering a worthwhile product. His motto: “‘Good enough’ is the enemy of humanity.” For Baruchel (who, with great reluctance, relinquished his own vintage BlackBerry just two years ago), the film is a parable, warning about what happens “when you get so big that you’re beholden to other masters.” 

If Balsillie (“ Ballsley, not  Ball-silly ,” he seethes) is the corporate devil on Lazaridis’ shoulder, the better, or at least geekier, angels of his nature are represented by longtime friend and cofounder, Doug Fregin. As imagined (and played by) Johnson, Doug is a hyperactive goober in wide, windshield eyeglasses and a David Foster Wallace headband. He compares Wi-Fi signals to the Force in Star Wars , pays for business lunches with cash pried out of a velcro Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wallet, and uses “ Glengarry Glen Ross ” as a verb.

For Johnson, pop culture is a kind of lingua franca. His cult web series turned Viceland sitcom  Nirvanna the Band the Show , is riven with references and extended homages: to the Criterion Collection,  Nintendo ’s Wii Shop Wednesday, the rollerblading sequence set to a Prodigy track in the 1995 film  Hackers . But more than a pop encyclopedia, Johnson is also a deft prober of the nerd pathology. In his feature debut, 2013’s  The Dirties , he plays an alienated high schooler avenging himself on his bullies by plotting a school shooting, under the auspice of making a student film  about  a school shooting. “School shooting comedy” is a tough sell. But Johnson committed to the premise with verve, humor, and considerable intelligence, revealing how certain dorky defense mechanisms (from pop culture obsessiveness to irony) can curdle into out-and-out psychopathy. 

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In this movie, Johnson gives the pop culture geek a fairer, more forgiving, shake. He wanted to create what he calls “the anti- Big Bang Theory ,” referring to the wildly popular syndicated sitcom that he regards “detestable.” “It’s no coincidence,” he points out, “that the guys who invented the first tele-communicator were all  Star Trek fanatics.”

BlackBerry ’s opening credits montage situates the device as part of a longer pop culture lineage, running from  Star Trek to  Blade Runner, Inspector Gadget , and  Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  The sequence draws a direct line from the pop culture obsessives of the past and the technologists of the present. As Johnson puts it, “I don’t think the nerds of the '90s get enough credit for inventing the future.” 

BlackBerry foregrounds this industriousness. In an early, legitimately thrilling sequence, a group of pale, bespectacled engineers frantically jury-rig a smartphone prototype out of a calculator, a TV remote, a Nintendo Game Boy, and a vintage Speak & Spell. Waking up at his desk the next morning in a puddle of his own drool, Doug declares, “I had a dream we were rich.” And then, citing  Dune , “And sometimes my dreams occur exactly as I dreamt them.”

But Doug’s dreams don’t materialize. Not exactly. However clever, these starry-eyed, far-sighted techies seem fatally outmatched by the realities of capital markets and corporate politicking. Balsillie sees the product foremost as a symbol of “total individualism … that fits in  your fist. ” The seriousness he affords the company—his marketing savvy, creative accounting, and ability to berate his underlings into submission—soon reveals itself in due course as a liability. 

While the CEOs push BlackBerry toward exponential growth, Johnson’s Doug is more concerned with holding on to the liberating, quasi-anarchic culture of tech innovation. As increasingly absurd deadlines loom, he makes a point of breaking for pizza parties, and emergency, in-office movie nights. (“They based Duke Nukem on this guy,” he chirps, pointing to Roddy Piper’s gun-toting wiseass in John Carpenter’s  They Live. ) Balsillie, meanwhile, writes him off as “a goof.” 

For Doug, the opportunity of making many billions of dollars does not have to run counter to a breezy atmosphere of innovation, experimentation, and goofing off. And  BlackBerry  is, tellingly, made in this same spirit.

Formally,  BlackBerry  is loose, almost improvisational. The camera roves, jitters, and pulls focus in an instant. The poppy humor and fly-on-the-wall, hyperrealist style combine in compelling ways. Imagine an Edgar Wright movie lensed like a Ken Loach film. The performances feel similarly off-the-cuff. When Howerton’s Balsillie attempts to intimidate a boardroom by howling, “I AM FROM WATERLOOOOOO! WHERE THE VAMPIRES HANG OUT!” the line feels snatched out of thin air. 

“I like when things are moving, when things are a little chaotic, when things are slightly unpredictable” says Howerton. “I think it creates an environment where you can create something that feels very real. It doesn't feel so calculated.” 

Baurchel calls Johnson’s process “organic.” He invites actors to go off-book, supplying their own reactions based on their understanding of the characters. Some in the company were less enthused by the free-form approach. Johnson recalls  Mad Men alum Rich Sommer, playing a Google engineer poached to rebuild BlackBerry’s network infrastructure, becoming so exasperated with the lack of more explicit direction that he removed his microphone on-set. (The shot of Sommer mouthing wordlessly is used in the final cut, suggesting his character’s own confusion and helplessness.) 

Despite being bigger-budgeted and more broadly appealing than, say, his mockumentary about a school shooter,  BlackBerry still feels intimate. Johnson reunites with a gang of fellow collaborators: writers, producers, editors, cinematographers, and a motley batch of like-minded pals who have all worked together on a string of small-scale, run-and-gun projects. There’s even a nose-thumbing, stick-it-to-the-man attitude apparent in the production’s liberal embrace of fair use copyright laws, which permit them to use extended clips from Hollywood blockbusters like  Raiders of the Lost Ark , without having to fork over hefty licensing fees.

This vaguely rebellious posture, and the value of cooperation, was Johnson’s way into  BlackBerry . “The only reason I even thought this story was interesting was because I thought, oh, these guys are independent filmmakers,” he explains, “who all of a sudden get in bed with somebody who really does know how the business side of filmmaking works. And that makes major cultural changes to the way that they're going to work together as friends.”

In the age of crypto bros, fraudulent CEOs, VCs bankrolling dopey apps, and a general disillusionment with the maximally profitable, minimally inspiring realm of “innovation,” tech culture can be fairly accused of forsaking its self-professed ideals of collaboration and camaraderie. But Johnson’s keen to keep that flame alive. He has made a movie about Big Tech’s vices and vicissitudes with a team of longtime collaborators, and a cast comprised largely of Canadian character actors, recruited from his backyard. 

BlackBerry, the company, may have grown too fast, lost its pluck. But  BlackBerry,  the movie, is a model of how to make something at scale, without having to do the same.  BlackBerry  plays like the comedy equivalent of the industrious dorks pulling an all-nighter in the garage, attempting to reengineer the world in their image.

To paraphrase an old Silicon Valley chestnut, when you move fast, things break. Move too fast, and those broken things become more valuable, and more irreparable. Or, as Research In Motion cofounder Douglas Fregin (or a “fictionalization” of him) puts it, while staring out at a bland, beige, soul-dead corporate office: “I finally understand that quote: ‘When you grow up, your heart dies.’ That’s from  Breakfast Club.  John Hughes.”

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Movie Reviews

A new film explains how the smartphone market slipped through blackberry's hands.

Justin Chang

Jay Baruchel plays Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film BlackBerry. IFC Films hide caption

Jay Baruchel plays Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in the film BlackBerry.

Like a lot of people, I'm a longtime iPhone user — in fact, I used an iPhone to record this very review. But I still have a lingering fondness for my very first smartphone — a BlackBerry — which I was given for work back in 2006. I loved its squat, round shape, its built-in keyboard and even its arthritis-inflaming scroll wheel.

Of course, the BlackBerry is now no more . And the story of how it became the hottest personal handheld device on the market, only to get crushed by the iPhone, is told in smartly entertaining fashion in a new movie simply titled BlackBerry.

Briskly adapted from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff's book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry , this is the latest of a few recent movies, including Tetris and Air , that show us the origins of game-changing new products. But unlike those earlier movies, BlackBerry is as much about failure as it is about success, which makes it perhaps the most interesting one of the bunch.

If you're clinging to an old BlackBerry, it will officially stop working on Jan. 4

It begins in 1996, when Research In Motion is just a small, scrappy company hawking modems in Waterloo, Ontario. Jay Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, a mild-mannered tech whiz who's the brains of the operation. His partner is a headband-wearing, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -loving goofball named Douglas Fregin, played by Matt Johnson, who also co-wrote and directed the movie.

Johnson's script returns us to an era of VHS tapes and dial-up internet, when the mere idea of a phone that could handle emails — let alone games, music and other applications — was unimaginable. That's exactly the kind of product that Mike and Doug struggle to pitch to a sleazy investor named Jim Balsillie, played by a raging Glenn Howerton, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia .

All Tech Considered

Saying goodbye to blackberry's iconic original keyboard.

Jim knows very little about tech but senses that the Research In Motion guys might be onto something, and he joins their ragtag operation and tries to whip their slackerish employees into shape. And so, after a crucial deal with Bell Atlantic, later to be known as Verizon, the BlackBerry is born. And it becomes such a hit, so addictive among users, that people start calling it the "CrackBerry."

The time frame shifts to the early 2000s, with Research In Motion now based in a slick new office, with a private jet at its disposal. But the mix of personalities is as volatile as ever — sometimes they gel, but more often they clash.

She left her 2007 iPhone in its box for over a decade. It just sold for $63K

Mike, as sweetly played by Baruchel, is now co-CEO, and he's still the shy-yet-stubborn perfectionist, forever tinkering with new improvements to the BlackBerry, and refusing to outsource the company's manufacturing operations to China. Jim, also co-CEO, is the Machiavellian dealmaker who pulls one outrageous stunt after another, whether he's poaching top designers from places like Google or trying to buy a National Hockey League team and move it to Ontario. That leaves Doug on the outside looking in, trying to boost staff morale with Raiders of the Lost Ark movie nights and maintain the geeky good vibes of the company he started years earlier.

As a director, Johnson captures all this in-house tension with an energetic handheld camera and a jagged editing style. He also makes heavy use of a pulsing synth score that's ideally suited to a tech industry continually in flux.

BlackBerry: If You Don't Survive, May You Rest In Peace

The movie doesn't entirely sustain that tension or sense of surprise to the finish; even if you don't know exactly how it all went down in real life, it's not hard to see where things are headed. Jim's creative accounting lands the company in hot water right around the time Apple is prepping the 2007 launch of its much-anticipated iPhone. That marks the beginning of the end, and it's fascinating to watch as BlackBerry goes into its downward spiral. It's a stinging reminder that success and failure often go together, hand in thumb-scrolling hand.

‘BlackBerry’ Review: A Ferocious and Nearly Unrecognizable Glenn Howerton Steals This Rowdy Tech-World Satire

Director Matt Johnson re-creates the excitement that followed the invention of the first smartphone, amplifying the atmosphere of chaos that surrounds an industry run by brilliant but immature young men.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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For a hot minute, it looked like BlackBerry might control the smartphone market. They got there first, figuring out how to use the existing data network to put email in users’ hands. Sure, it all came packaged in a device as thick and unwieldy as a slice of French toast — too big for most people’s pockets, not at all comfortable to hold up to one’s ear. Still, Canada-based electronics company Research in Motion revolutionized how mobile phones worked and what they could do, making billionaires of its co-founders. So what happened?

The outrageous, often quotable dialogue draws inspiration from Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet (whose “Glengarry Glen Ross” is actually name-dropped by the characters). “I’ll keep firing until this room is not full of little children playing with their little penises,” Michael Ironside growls at one point, playing the company’s bulldog COO, seemingly the only adult in the room. Later, forced to use a pay phone after BlackBerry overloads the network, Glenn Howerton smashes the receiver to pieces while screaming, “There are three reasons people buy our phones. … They. Fucking. Work!” Lines like that fit well with DP Jared Raab’s grody, handheld style, which suggests a cross between “The Office” and “In the Loop,” shot from across parking lots and the far side of cluttered workspaces.

And then there’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” star Howerton, the MVP in an all-around terrific ensemble, who shaved the top of his head to play balding, no-nonsense Jim Balsillie. Like a shark in the kiddie pool, Howerton delivers the kind of performance that can make a career, or force audiences to totally reconsider an actor’s potential. Jim’s ruthless business instincts run directly counter to the nerds’ undisciplined approach. He agrees to leave his job (technically, he’s already been fired and has no other options) and steer RIM to delivering on its promise — the one Mike and Doug fumbled to articulate in the film’s haphazard opening pitch session, quoting their high school shop teacher: “The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world.”

Cruising around in a beat-up Honda hatchback, the duo — and the rest of the RIM team — come across as overgrown toddlers, incapable of cleaning their own rooms. They’re far too rowdy and immature to focus on the task at hand, wasting valuable time playing Command & Conquer at the office, where stacks of defective modems line the walls and someone stuck a toilet plunger on top of a computer monitor. Rarely has a film captured the spirit of creative chaos that characterizes so much of Silicon Valley — although it’s important to note that RIM’s rise-and-fall trajectory took place half a continent away in Waterloo, Ontario.

This is a Canadian story, told by Canadian filmmakers, who treat the whole loony affair as a matter of national pride. Sure, it’s full of hubris, from Mike’s incredulity at the notion that consumers would prefer a keyboard-free device (one of the iPhone’s many design improvements) to Jim’s illegal strategy of backdating stock options to lure engineers from rival companies like Google. But “BlackBerry” is surprisingly charitable to the parties involved, acknowledging that these visionaries, while making it up as they go along, still managed to change the way the world communicates. Taking a page from “The Social Network,” it follows these two altogether-too-polite besties through the ringer, as they try to maintain their friendship amid the financial pressure that running a successful tech company imposes.

There are some who look back fondly on the BlackBerry and the way it let them hammer out emails with their thumbs. It’s a wistfulness on par with how Blockbuster has made a minor comeback for those who claim nostalgia for late fees and the obligation of having to rewind VHS tapes. For most, the BlackBerry was a primitive product that served its purpose until something better came along — namely, the Apple iPhone. And though Johnson’s movie suggests other factors may have contributed to its demise, it’s hard to ignore that the company got out-innovated in the end. The film, at least, feels fresh, making geek history more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Reviewed at Soho House screening room, Los Angeles, Feb. 15, 2023. In Berlin, SXSW film festivals. Running time: 121 MIN.

• Production: (Canada) An IFC Films release of an Elevation Pictures, XYZ Films presentation, with the participation of Telefilm Canada, CBC Films, Ontario Creates, in association with IPR.VC, of a Rhombus Media, Zapruder Films production. Producers: Niv Fichman, Matthew Miller, Fraser Ash, Kevin Krikst.
• Crew: Director: Matt Johnson. Screenplay: Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller, based on the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry” by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff. Camera: Jared Raab. Editor: Curt Lobb. Music: Jay McCarrol.
• With: Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Michelle Giroux, Sungwon Cho, Mark Critch, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes.

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Blackberry review – souped-up account of the rise and fall of ‘Crackberry’

Hilarity and pathos intertwine in this likable comedy as the smartphone creators go loopy with wealth – and slack-jawed when the iPhone spoils the party

H ere is a punchy Canadian comedy-drama in that burgeoning true-life genre which could loosely be called Tech Startup Hubris; we’ve seen Dumb Money (about GameStop), WeCrashed (about WeWork), and The Beanie Bubble (about the bizarre 90s web-driven tulip-style craze for Beanie Babies). The great ancestor of them all is naturally David Fincher’s The Social Network , about Facebook, with its propulsive script by Aaron Sorkin. This film is a fictionally souped-up account of the steep rise and sudden fall of the BlackBerry, the handset device that towards the end of the 00s was so ubiquitous and addictive among the white-collar classes it was known as the “Crackberry”.

But then Steve Jobs unveiled his iPhone, and the BlackBerry executives suddenly looked like a bunch of brontosauruses that had been hit in the face by a meteor.

Jay Baruchel plays BlackBerry’s greying co-founder Mike Lazaridis ; a shy, nerdy, brilliant innovator who is details-obsessive. Matt Johnson, who is the film’s director and co-writer, plays Mike’s goofball partner Doug Fregin, and Johnson’s directing duties perhaps meant he’d taken the eye off his own performance a little, as he does little other than stare with sweaty, slack-jawed and horrified incredulity at his buddy Mike selling out to the Man.

This latter is represented by gimlet-eyed investor Jim Balsillie, played by Glenn Howerton , almost unrecognisable from his role on TV’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; Balsillie is the uptight suit-wearing guy who gets these nerdy Star Wars-loving dopes and slackers into financial shape (while of course betraying their creative, fooling-around ethos). These three cartoony personae loosely correspond to Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker as portrayed in The Social Network; none of them, however, have a family or romantic life away from the office, an important part of how Sorkin conceived his characters.

Well, this is a watchable enough film; there is hilarious delusion in Balsillie’s fanatical desire to buy up hockey teams with his new superwealth, and pure pathos when the BlackBerry team watch Jobs demonstrating the iPhone, like silent movie veterans witnessing the new talkies, speaking out loud their own imminent demise.

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BlackBerry Reviews

One of 2023's 20 best films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 12, 2024

As the film progresses, the humor becomes more ironic, but it never loses its ability to make us reflect and laugh at the same time. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 1, 2024

The comedy comes instead from Johnson’s deliberate direction. It’s found in an ironic zoom here, a hilarious cut there. This alchemy finds the most magic in how it supports Glenn Howerton’s towering performance.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

It is in Glenn Howerton’s over-the-top portrayal of Jim that BlackBerry soars above everything else you’ve seen in this genre, and catapults BlackBerry into the satirical stratosphere.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 3, 2024

Friendship and family start us off...and here we are still thrashing...

Full Review | Jan 5, 2024

It's a devilishly entertaining comedy-drama, that boasts solid performances and never loses its consistent pace chronicling the rise and fall of BlackBerry. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 2, 2024

Jay Baruchel is wonderful as BlackBerry creator Mike Lazaridis, but it’s Glenn Howerton who steals the show as co-CEO Jim Balsillie, giving a hysterical, hot-tempered performance that could slot right into an episode of Succession.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2023

[It's] a tale of what happens when pals become business partners, when smart little companies get into bed with big dumb ones, and what happens to game-changers when the rules are been thrown out the window by someone else.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 8, 2023

It’s by the numbers, and its sense of self importance renders it all kind of silly.

Full Review | Nov 28, 2023

Presenting us with very human protagonists and developing a potentially boring narrative with energy, “BlackBerry” works as a docu-drama. Surely those who were alive at this time and had a BlackBerry will feel some nostalgia. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 25, 2023

Despite playing the story for more laughs than are probably necessary, the lead performances of BlackBerry are very watchable, and the story of the brand’s rise and demise is certainly one worth watching.

Full Review | Nov 15, 2023

This entertaining film features standout work from Baruchel, especially when he begins to crack with the realization that Apple is getting ready to kill his company with their upcoming iPhone, a product with the highest consumer interest in history.

Full Review | Oct 24, 2023

BlackBerry is an impressive feat that marks Johnson’s leap from indie darling/TV Director to someone to genuinely watch out for.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2023

Investing heartily in its story's personalities, and eschewing myth-making reverence or preciousness, BlackBerry's makers entertainingly frame their film as a workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 15, 2023

Pacy, well-acted, and brilliantly written, this boardroom farce pushes all right the buttons.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 10, 2023

Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

[BlackBerry] perfectly captures the nerds-versus-the-system volatility of the tech bubble: Baruchel and Johnson stammer and gulp, while Howerton commands the film like a fascist warrior who uses fools to floss his teeth.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2023

Johnson is also ruthless in his depiction of the business reality behind the glossy surface waffle of the tech dream.

Yet despite the guffaws, the film (directed by Matt Johnson) is deeper than a mere morality play about villainous money men.

It’s a film, ultimately, about failure. And immediately that makes it a far more intriguing proposition than all the boardroom backslapping of a movie such as Air.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 8, 2023

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‘blackberry’ review: jay baruchel and glenn howerton in a scrappy account of the once-ubiquitous smartphone.

Director Matt Johnson also stars in this chronicle of dizzying tech-geek glory preceding a humbling crash and burn.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It seems like a lifetime ago that the millions of us who spent the early 2000s thumbing away on our BlackBerry smartphones swore those beloved devices would have to be torn from our cold, dead hands before we’d surrender them. The very idea of a cellphone without a trackpad or keyboard seemed like heresy, and for many of us, our introduction to iPhones or other suspiciously sleek Android models was a traumatic transition, making our fingers feel like those clumsy hot dog hands in Everything Everywhere All at Once .

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Matt Johnson ’s uneven but reasonably entertaining BlackBerry tells the tale of that once-revolutionary invention out of Waterloo, Ontario, and the band of uber-nerd techies at Research in Motion (RIM) who made it happen. This required an alliance with a business-minded shark who was busy manipulating company stocks while the cellphone wars were hastening the device’s obsolescence. It’s an affectionately told story of Canadian innovation, loss of innocence and of unlikely bedfellows making entrepreneurial magic.

Those two chief driving forces are co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis ( Jay Baruchel ) and Jim Balsillie ( Glenn Howerton ), the former a guileless brainiac and the latter a cunning operator who somehow saw a goldmine in one of the most stunningly inept investor presentations ever depicted onscreen.

Johnson’s movie is a bit like those two characters — a slightly goofy, stranger-than-fiction workplace comedy that doesn’t always mesh seamlessly with the downfall thriller into which it evolves. Nor is Balsillie’s wheeler-dealer chicanery to circumvent a hostile takeover attempt always as lucid as it could be, which causes a loss of momentum.

The interactions between straight-talking, foul-mouthed Jim, with his grounding in cutthroat corporate culture, and the Doug crew, whose work ethic comes a distant second to their enthusiasm for movie nights and idle web-surfing, provides some of BlackBerry ’s most amusing scenes. Just the contrast between impeccably groomed Jim’s sharply cut suits and Doug’s man-child uniform of shapeless nerd tees and sweatbands is a visual gag in itself.

There’s also an appealing quasi-buddy element in the gradual shift from Mike and Jim regarding each other as different species to them learning to work together toward a common goal. One nice moment, for instance, involves a hastily prepared prototype presentation to the board of a wireless provider in New York, where they see through Jim’s slick but empty sales pitch until diffident electronics genius Mike’s tech savvy saves his ass.

A quick cut from there to an Oprah clip in which Winfrey bellows her amazement about the newfangled multitasking device to an excitable studio audience represents the ultimate breakthrough in consumer acceptance.

Instead, the writers skip straight ahead to the realization that the company, despite its success, is vulnerable to corporate predators, once personal digital assistant manufacturer Palm swoops in. Cary Elwes has fun dialing up the smug bravado as Palm CEO Carl Yankowski, who may also have had a hand in sabotaging an early $16 million deal Lazaridis and Fregin had made to supply modems to U.S. Robotics. But the storytelling grows haphazard as Balsillie embarks on a shady quest to thwart Yankowski’s plan, undermining RIM’s stability in the process.

To be effective, a high-stakes corporate thriller requires mounting conflict, razor-sharp plotting and teeth, qualities that are not Johnson’s strong points. So the film meanders along instead of injecting suspense into the descent, as company strategy gets wobbly, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission begins sniffing around and new competitors in the marketplace up the pressure. Even the bellwether of doom represented by Steve Jobs’ historic first unveiling of the iPhone, shrouded in secrecy throughout its development, is undersold as a narrative turning point.

Pacing could be more consistent, but regular Johnson collaborator Jay McCarrol’s synth score gooses the energy and fits the subject matter, complemented by some choice needle drops from Joy Division, The Strokes, Moby and The White Stripes. The cleverest of them is The Kinks’ classic, “Waterloo Sunset,” deftly repurposed as a dream of melancholy nostalgia for another Waterloo, across the Atlantic.

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