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.
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.
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.