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With intelligence as sharp as its humor, BlackBerry takes a terrifically entertaining look at the rise and fall of a generation-defining gadget.

BlackBerry makes riveting drama out of a real-life company's spectacular rise and fall from grace.

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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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A man with gray hair stands looking down at a device while a group of men cheer in the background.

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.

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BlackBerry Is a Movie That Portrays Tech Dreams Honestly—Finally

Jay Baruchel as “Mike Lazaridis” and Matt Johnson as “Doug” in Matt Johnsons BlackBerry

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.

How to Get a Real ID License Before the Deadline

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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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.

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‘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?

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: 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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BlackBerry Is a New Kind of Business Biopic

Even more enthralling than the story of a successful company is the story of one that crashed and burned.

Two men riding in an elevator, staring somewhat skeptically at the ceiling, in "BlackBerry"

The “business biopic” is Hollywood’s subgenre du jour, a way to sneak dramas for grown-ups into theaters by building them around brand-name products that everyone recognizes. Want to see a movie where character actors actually get to have whole conversations without a caped hero bursting through a wall? Well, here’s the origin story of a world-famous shoe or a best-selling video game . These films are usually about famed pioneers such as Facebook and Apple . BlackBerry instead tells the tale of a rise and fall: a technological revolution that ended up as a historical blip.

A small business ballooning into enormous success, being surprised by its own good fortune, and then struggling to outsmart the sharks around it is a very Canadian narrative: that of a well-liked underdog that nevertheless gets steamrolled. It’s fittingly told by the Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, one of the country’s finest indie bards, whose oeuvre includes the micro-budget thriller The Dirties and the conspiracy thriller Operation Avalanche . A similarly quirky sensibility is reflected in his portrayal of Research in Motion, the Waterloo, Ontario, tech upstart that created the BlackBerry smartphone in the late ’90s and briefly crested to the top of the market before being swept under by the arrival of the iPhone and Android.

Read: The iPhone was inevitable

Johnson also plays RIM’s co-founder Douglas Fregin, an intermittently lovable goof who runs his company like a clubhouse for nerds, screening movies for employees while his business partner, Mike Lazaridis (played by Jay Baruchel), tinkers in the background. Mike, who sports a prematurely gray swoosh of hair and big chunky glasses, is an unimpressive pitchman for his own product. But when he and the more energetic Douglas finally get in front of a venture capitalist named Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), they spew enough buzzwords about the future of handheld computing to attract his attention.

The story of BlackBerry is one of ingenuity mixed with perfect timing. Lazaridis was among the first people in the industry to realize the implications of wireless data networks, which allow users to communicate via the internet without incurring standard phone charges. In the film, his cerebral vision is balanced out by Jim, who has the carnivorous business instinct to elbow his partners to the front of the line. Although their wildly clashing personalities somehow cohere, the easygoing Douglas sees trouble ahead as Jim takes more and more control of RIM’s daily operations, transforming it from a charming tech shop in a strip mall into a corporate powerhouse on a sprawling campus.

Baruchel’s performance as Mike is naturalistic and awkward, his half-whispered interjections constantly trailing off before he’s even done explaining some complex new algorithm. Howerton, whom I know best for his work on the long-running sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia , plays Jim with crass gusto, unleashing torrents of cold-blooded capitalistic fury at every meek techie in his path. The BlackBerry phone owed much of its popularity to its inventive features, such as a satisfying clicky keyboard and an encrypted messenger app, but Johnson’s film clarifies that it still needed a push from a bullheaded personality to get over the line.

The real can’t-look-away pleasure of BlackBerry , though, is in the movie’s final act, when Jim’s financial rule-bending and Mike’s insistence on expensive design elements start to drag the company into disaster. The fun of business biopics doesn’t usually lie in their ending—the viewer knows that Tetris and Air Jordan will eventually be a hit. But in this case, although the genesis of the BlackBerry is certainly interesting, the characters’ hubris, and their melancholy upon realizing that the product was simply a waypoint on a grander socio-technological journey, is what makes BlackBerry most compelling.

I was surprised by how deftly the film shifted my sympathy to Douglas by the end. At the start, he’s a malcontented impediment to growth, loudly complaining as Jim restructures the workplace and urges Mike to invent harder and faster. By the end, he’s a stand-in for the company’s last remnants of integrity, someone who firmly refuses to embrace the ruthless march to progress that all these narratives demand. BlackBerry is one of the best business biopics I’ve seen, because it’s fueled by that skepticism; it’s a roller coaster that viewers can enjoy riding all the way up, but it’s not afraid to question its own climax the whole way down.

BlackBerry review: how a tech revolution became a geek tragedy

Jay baruchel and glenn howerton deliver engaging performances in this entertaining tale about the rise and fall of a smartphone pioneer.

Technology delivers all types of incredible societal advances. But the mad-dash nature of Western capitalism and the emotional fitfulness of the consumer marketplace also creates graveyards of arriviste empires—faddish companies with a product or service that intersects heavily with a particular moment in time, but ends in the type of mismanaged disaster only fully understood postmortem. BlackBerry , directed by multi-hyphenate Matt Johnson, is an engaging new film that charts the incredible rise and spectacular flameout of its titular product, the world’s first smartphone—which, for a period of time , controlled 45 percent of the cell phone market and seemed unstoppable as a cultural force.

Spinning off Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s nonfiction book Losing The Signal , Johnson and co-screenwriter Matthew Miller invest heartily in the story’s personalities. But instead of reverence or preciousness, they frame BlackBerry as an oddball workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.