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I’m old enough to remember the point in time when BlackBerry phones were everywhere. My mother had one of them before switching on over to an iPhone, and my father likes holding onto his own. There was a point in time as a kid, where I thought to myself that these were the sort of phones that I wanted, and now I have a mere Android smartphone which I use every day. I couldn’t help but keep thinking back about how these were the phones I thought were the coolest things ever while watching BlackBerry, but that’s also a huge part in where the appeal of Matt Johnson’s biopic about the spectacular rise and fall of the Canadian smartphone line comes in.

Starring Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton as Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, BlackBerry tells the story of the development of the now-discontinued BlackBerry line of smartphones. Lazaridis is shown to be a more earnest developer only wanting nothing but the best quality out of his own products, but Balsillie has a different way of running things: always very cut-throat and foul-mouthed. As these two mismatched heads continually butt heads over the development of the titular smartphone line, Matt Johnson’s film also details their eventual failure to keep up in the continually ongoing smartphone wars within the coming days.

BlackBerry doesn’t break any new ground within the realms of the biopic, often treading those same lines as any other detailing the start of any big business. Yet Matt Johnson keeps everything entertaining enough to the point where you can’t really help but stick with it. All the tech lingo doesn’t sound like that, you’re in the same airtight space that Baruchel and Howerton occupy as they try to convince you that the BlackBerry phones might just as easily have become the greatest innovation for cell phones during their time. All of this is so cleverly written to the point that all those beats you expect still hit perfectly well, like a good biopic should do.

There’s also a lot to be admired in the fact that Matt Johnson captures how this endeavour to innovate the way people say cell phones through the BlackBerry cell phone line would have shown itself to be a very naïve one, if the people behind the scenes were not prepared. While it’s also clear that this is where everything shows itself to be very funny, it’s also where the cracks behind Research in Motion start to come open. And as the wounds begin to widen, the supposed professionalism that they try to maintain ends up showing the audience where the phones were doomed to fail. It’s not so much your usual “small business grows big” sort of story as much as it is the story of a company that doomed themselves as the demands for innovation came left and right, to a point where we’ve now reached a unanimous look for most smartphones in today’s world.

A piece like this could easily have lent itself to becoming a hagiographic portrait of the people behind a product that was innovative for its time, but BlackBerry presents the case where these were people who were unable to catch up with the times. The phones themselves were as cool as you would expect them to be in the early to mid-2000’s, but the gimmick of having a “computer in your pocket” which Lazaridis and Balsillie tried their hardest to sell you in on, as Johnson presents their ideas like you’re in a pitch room with them, was not set to last. Which in turn makes for a more interesting film than you’d expect with this template – and maybe the appropriate way to document the crash and burn of this phone line.

Most of my notes for BlackBerry were written on my Google Pixel 3 XL. Which, as I know right now, has already been phased out – like many other cell phones can be by the people higher up. But as much as this is a film all about how people tried to sell an idea for the time, perhaps it’s also the perfect way to capture what it feels like to be caught in the middle of a cell phone war that’s only set to keep going and going. And this might just as well be the case for technology in general, for Matt Johnson might have found the perfect way to tell this story through the rise and fall of the BlackBerry line of phones. By the time the film ended, I came out thinking to myself that these BlackBerry phones were still as neat as I thought they’d have been when I was ten years old.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Elevation Pictures.

Directed by Matt Johnson
Screenplay by 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 Nish and Sean Silcoff
Produced by Fraser Ash, Niv Fichman, Kevin Krikst, Matthew Miller
Starring Glenn Howerton, Jay Baruchel, Matt Johnson, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Michelle Giroux, SungWon Cho, Mark Critch, Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes
Release Date: May 12, 2023
Running Time: 121 minutes