Review: ‘BlackBerry’ Sounds Like Parody, But it’s the Best Business Drama This Year

On paper, Matt Johnson’s new historical drama BlackBerry sounds like a parody of modern biopics.

Comedy actors Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruchel as the stars? Who is asking for a movie about the rise of an outdated smartphone in 2023? Why bother when we already have plenty of tech flicks out there?

And yet, shockingly…it’s actually pretty good. The leads are very strong and aren’t out of place, and the humor is appropriate without being too silly. I would even go as far as to say the film probably has the strongest structure of all the recently released business dramas.

In 1996 Waterloo, Canada, computer engineers Mike Lazaridis (Baruchel) and Doug Fredon (Johnson) are struggling to sell their new invention of a mobile phone plus e-mail that’s half the size of competitors. Entrepreneur Jim Balsillie (Howerton) suddenly pitches them an offer to get their product off the ground if they hire him as CEO of their tiny tech company, Research in Motion. Michael Ironside, Rich Sommer and SungWon Cho appear as RIM colleagues.

Within a decade their device goes from a pipe dream to a major player. But like all good things comes temptation, especially for Jim.

Johnson’s feature is very much in the ethos of the traditional tech biopic like Martyn Burke’s Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) and David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010). The former kept crossing my mind while viewing BlackBerry, since it’s one of my favorite movies.

What’s interesting about this smartphone picture is that it truly is a rise-and-fall tale rather than a success story. Unlike Windows, iPhones and Facebook, no one uses a BlackBerry anymore. They started in obscurity and went back into it after only 13 years.

I loved Baruchel’s hilarious delivery of the question, “Why would anyone want a smartphone without a keypad?” Howerton achieves a smooth mix of clever and power-hungry as the owner of RIM. And as with Ben Affleck’s Air, I’m a sucker for opening credits that are a pop-culture montage.

I did feel Johnson was a bit too much with his comic-relief heavy role as the third BlackBerry founder. I get the sense the writer-director wanted Fredon’s character to feel like the Steve Wozniak of the RIM team, at least on film. But a lot of the time he came across more obnoxious than endearing.

Something that stuck out to me in both Air and BlackBerry is how very male-centered the biz drama/biopic subgenre generally is. One exception might be The Social Network, which revolves around Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg attempting to get back at a former girlfriend.

In these new films there are essentially only a couple of women included, usually in a secretary or receptionist position. There isn’t even a token “concerned wife” for one of the protagonists to vent to. The men in these movies are virtually sexless and 100% focused on their careers.

Yes, usually there are a lot more men than women with these types of stories, but surely there is some estrogen running through the history at some point. Surely the filmmakers know they’re instantly setting themselves up for a Bechdel Test fail by not including any female input. Are they trying to argue adding a love interest would be pointless and dated?

Where are the women of STEM? I’m not sure the answer to this, but if you like corporate drama, BlackBerry will do the trick.