BLACKBERRY: A Farcical Biopic About The Modern Communication Boom

BlackBerry plays as a mockumentary biopic from our neighbors up north. This is a Canadian story after all.

In the opening moments, we hear the words and see footage of a bespectacled man in black & white. This is Arthur C. Clarke, and he made a bold prediction about the future: “Men will no longer commute — they will communicate.”

The movie feels like the tangential origin story of our modern communication just as The Social Network dramatized the development of social media. In fact, a decade later The Social Network still serves as an inspiration for a whole slew of brand and business-minded biopics proliferating on TV and Film. Somehow these stories of unparalleled success as well as unbridled failure capture the zeitgeist in a world rampant with hustle culture.

Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton seem like they found their hair out of The Big Short-era and in truth BlackBerry feels like the scrappy little brother to its predecessors as conceived by Matt Johnson.

Research in Motion in Waterloo, Ontario is introduced as a ragtag assortment of nerds with a radical idea and the know-how to try implementing it. Baruchel always had the awkward shtick down. It’s his essence as a comedic actor. Somehow his hair rather like Nick Mohammed‘s Nate in Ted Lasso seems to denote the potential for maturation even as it cannot quite conceal all his naivete. He headlines as Mike Lazaridis.

Johnson, who not only directed but co-wrote the script with Matthew Miller, also stars as BlackBerry co-creator Douglas Fregin. He seems to be manifesting a bit of Andy Samberg‘s Hot Rod energy as the dorky second-in-command who’s never found without his bandana or big ol’ nerd glasses.

They’re introduced in a woefully painful pitch before an exec named Jim Balsillie (Howerton). They’re out of their depth, and yet he sees the potential and with it the capital to get him out of his own crummy situation.

A New Rise and Fall Narrative

BlackBerry brings to the fore the kind of lovable losers, unassuming schmucks, and self-destructive narcissists no one would have ever considered making biopics about generations ago. We’re past hagiography and prefer irreverent oddball tales rife with humor to spice up a generally staid form. It’s become the new normal.

The movie charts the conflict between the corporate suit who knows how to play hardball and the uncouth minds who are capable of creating cutting-edge products. They have no structure only a bullpen of nerds to go with weekly movie nights. It’s evident that while this might be an uneasy partnership between the demonstrative Balsillie and the far more nebbish Lazaridis, it evolves into a symbiotic relationship; they both need each other. Hence why they become Co-CEOs.

He brings his sense of business acumen and whips them into something even as they hold up their end of the bargain. They not only build new prototype for the BlackBerry but also figure out how to construct a network large enough for more than a handful of cellular devices.

When the BlackBerry comes on the scene as represented by a promo from Oprah with The Strokes jamming in the background you get the complete encapsulation of the cultural moment. They are on the rise and the early 2000s feel like an exciting time with a wealth of possibilities.

They begin marketing the BlackBerry not just as a new piece of technology but as the latest status symbol of the nouveau riche. Jim goes to work poaching other talent with astronomical salaries even as he continues moving the business along by selling more product than they’re prepared to support. He expects the guys he’s paid to come up with solutions.

The company’s constantly going through growing pains, living on the edge of success and utter decimation. It’s a tenuous way to do business, though, for a time, they’re able to make it work. History tells us it will not last.

Archival footage of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone presages the future and all the BlackBerry crew standing in front of that presentation see the writing on the wall. We’re still feeling the seismic impact of these same events to this very day.

PalmPilot and BlackBerry feel positively twee now having gone obsolete, the way of MySpace and Napster. iPhone and the forbidden fruit of Apple rules the industry, and the idea of smart devices and Wifi networks are now all commonplace. We take them for granted. In fact, we are all living through the cultural experiment spawned by smartphones and social media, in the wake of the economic downturn of the Great Recession.

Conclusion: BlackBerry

BlackBerry is not a film that takes a radical departure from the form, but its mixture of comedy and workplace drama — taking cues from the likes of The Big Short and The Office — makes it delectable viewing.

In the end, the obligatory postscripts provide the outcomes of our main characters. It could be yet another story about corruption or frayed relationships disrupted by want of power and money. We get hints of this with the riff between Lazaridis and Fregin as the former tries to evolve with their business.

Still, their trajectories don’t feel as demoralizing as they could have been, and the movie’s lingering sense of humor makes it more farcical than it is a devastating tragedy.

If anything, where we’ve gone in the last 15-odd years seems to have proved Arthur C. Clarke‘s words to be prescient. We are in constant communication with one another without even leaving our homes. BlackBerrys might be gone, but we are inundated with communication like never before.

BlackBerry will be released theatrically on May 12, 2023.

Watch BlackBerry