The $5m indie drama Blackberry got a bit lost in a 2023 shuffle of product origin story movies. Here’s why you should track down Matt Johnson’s terrific film.
It’s hard to say exactly who the culprit is behind the recent mini-trend in frothy dramas about the creation of popular products. Are films like Air (about the meeting and follow-up phone call that led to the creation of a shoe) or Tetris (about the deal-making that brought the Russian puzzle game to the west) a belated reaction to David Fincher’s The Social Network?
Whatever the reason, they appear to be here to stay, at least for now: 2023 also saw the release of The Beanie Bubble, about the brief interest in a brand of stuffed toys circa 1995. This May, we’re getting Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, which is about as self-explanatory as film titles get.
Of all the product-based dramas we’ve seen in the past year or two, though, Matt Johnson’s Blackberry is arguably the best. This is partly because it not only commits to the nerdy detail of its subject matter, and the technical problem solving that went into its invention, but also stretches further, weaving a story about the compromises that go into making something a success, and how those compromises can too easily lead to failure and disillusionment.
It should also be added that the construction of Blackberry’s script – co-written by Johnson and Matthew Miller – is wryly funny, filled with pathos, and pretty much flawless.
Like most dramas of this type, Blackberry’s a rise-and-fall story. It begins in 1996, when Canadian tech geeks Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) are struggling to sell the concept of their new gadget: PocketLink, which is essentially the distant ancestor of the modern smartphone.
Unfortunately, their grand-sounding company, Research In Motion (RIM), amounts to a bunch of highly intelligent yet undisciplined oiks in their early 20s, who treat a day’s work like a LAN party – there are ad-hoc networked games of Command & Conquer, screenings of cult films, debates about Star Trek lore, and so on.
Worse still, nobody seems to quite understand the product Lazaridis and Fregin are trying to get off the ground – partly because nothing quite like it has been seen before, but also because the pair are absolutely horrendous salesmen. Fatefully, though, the inventors cross paths with Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), the kind of sharp-elbowed corporate type who can stand commandingly in meeting rooms at big companies like Verizon. Before long, RIM has found the backing it needs, and the Blackberry – a mobile device made famous for its clicky, physical little keyboard – is born.
The way Blackberry quickly sketches in the details of its characters is excellent. Lazaridis is the problem solver – someone who can’t resist fixing things if he spots a fault, even if it’s mere seconds before a meeting is due to kick off. Fregin’s hardly less intelligent, but also clearly the most undisciplined of the pair from the off – that he wears shorts and a red bandana even in the most businesslike of settings is at least one giveaway.
The duo are the clear heroes of the piece, even as Balsillie – played with captivating venom by Howerton – might initially seem like its villain. Instead, though, Blackberry does something much smarter and more even-handed: Balsillie emerges as the catalyst for both the titular device’s success and the wider company’s eventual fall from grace. Nor is Balsillie a straightforward caricature of the suited, corporate stiff: with his bald head and odd surname (both things loudly mocked by at least one character in the film), he too is something of an outsider. There’s the sense that at RIM he’s the big fish in a small pond, but like Lazardis and Fregin, would struggle to survive for more than a few minutes in an ocean full of sharks.
Balsillie also has a tendency to trim corners and distort rules in order to get what he wants, which like Lazardis’ tinkering, is a character trait that will one day come back to haunt him.
In other words, Blackberry treats all of its characters like rounded, believable people – all of them have their blindspots, their talents, their tics and their flaws, but none are all good or all bad. This is partly why the film remains so engrossing, even when its characters are sitting around talking about things like breaking down packets of data into smaller chunks so they can avoid choking up Verizon’s networks; we’re invested in the fate of this oddball cast, making their moment-to-moment decision-making loaded with consequence.
Shot in a verite style, largely with handheld cameras, Blackberry’s commitment to the grungy minutiae of 90s office spaces and socially awkward computer engineers recalls the criminally underseen TV series Halt And Catch Fire, or Andrew Bujalksi’s magnificently off-kilter Computer Chess from 2013. Like those, Blackberry makes a virtue of its low budget, with its documentary style and down-at-heel locations (particularly in the first half, before all the leather seats and Lear jets emerge) adding to its engrossing realism.
Only some conspicuously obvious wigs – which make the film look endearingly like Spike Jonze’s Sabotage video for The Beastie Boys in places – conspire against it, though even these are easily overlooked as the story unspools.
Intriguingly, Johnson himself has described Blackberry as “The anti-Social Network” in the past. In an interview with The Verge, the multi-hyphenate filmmaker was asked about his influences, particularly movies about tech; Johnson replied that he’d watched The Social Network with the rest of the production team when it came out in cinemas years earlier, but found himself “bored by it.”
“Even though it is considered a classic and universally beloved – there are parts of that film that I really love – but it’s so manicured and so controlled and so operatic that it doesn’t represent reality to me in any way,” Johnson said. “They were not people that I could relate to. I’m not trying to say it’s a bad movie. It’s just that, in some ways, we were trying to do the anti-Social Network. We were trying to do a Social Network where you are watching people that you recognise and you thought, ‘Oh, I could be this person, or these are people that I knew.’”
Even if you disagree with Johnson’s assessment of David Fincher’s film, it’s certainly the case that Blackberry feels pleasingly at odds with those other product-genesis films listed earlier. Far from a glib hurrah for the wonders of capitalism and intrepid executives with good haircuts and big ideas, Blackberry is refreshingly clear-eyed about the fickle nature of success: the intelligence, dedication and luck that goes into acquiring it, and how our own flaws can serve to undermine it.
There’s also a throughline about the way personal ideals can so often be sacrificed in order to succeed – something perfectly illustrated in Blackberry’s final shot, which manages to tie together two seemingly incidental moments from earlier in the film (not least a mention of Lazardis’ favourite movie) into one sublime pay-off.
Sadly, a film about compromises – whether they’re creative, moral, technical or even legal – has itself been compromised in recent months. Following a disappointingly muted turn-out in cinemas, Blackberry was released on US channel AMC+ as a three-part series in November 2023, presumably with extra footage added to pad out the original feature’s two-hour duration. As our own Simon Brew wrote at the time, “On the one hand, it’s likely to put more eyeballs onto a production that very much deserves that. On the other hand, well, it was made as a film, sold as a film, released as a film. It seems an odd path that if a movie doesn’t set the box office alight, it can just be chopped up and reframed.”
If there’s any justice, Blackberry’s one of those films that will continue to be discovered and talked about in the coming years. Like all the best stories, it’s about something far more important – and universal – than a fiddly-looking device whose popularity peaked over a decade ago. Cult status surely beckons.
