Review: ‘BlackBerry’ is a rollicking tale with nutty charm

BlackBerry

Starring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton, Matt Johnson, Saul Rubinek, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Cary Elwes, Michelle Giroux, Sungwon Cho and Mark Critch. Written by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller. Directed by Matt Johnson. Opens Friday at multiple Toronto theatres. 119 minutes. STC

There are many “Eureka!” moments in “BlackBerry,” Matt Johnson’s rollicking and mostly true account of how the world’s first smartphone, made right here in Canada, went from must to bust.

Research in Motion founders Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (actor/writer/director Johnson) share high fives and joyful whoops with their fellow RIM geeks whenever technical problems — and there are many — are overcome on the road to creating the game-changing BlackBerry, their handheld device that is phone, email and pager all in one.

My favourite “Eureka!” flash occurs during breakfast at the Seinfeldian diner where RIM folks regularly convene. Mike suddenly realizes how to solve a wireless network bandwidth snafu that is threatening to sink their Waterloo, Ont., tech firm just as it’s achieving global greatness in the early years of this century.

“You can have my bacon!” Mike yells to his companions, as he abandons his unfinished meal to run back to BlackBerry HQ.

The scene speaks to the nutty charm of Johnson’s movie, which begins in 1996 to the hip-shaking strains of Elastica’s “Connection” and which, in its quintessentially Canadian against-all-odds way, resembles such earlier hoser classics as “Project Grizzly” and “Goon” (which also co-starred Baruchel).

It’s impossible to imagine Thomas Edison, say, yelling, “You gonna finish those fries?” as he switched on his electric light bulb for the first time. Or Henry Ford moaning about the lack of jelly doughnuts as he inaugurated his automobile assembly line.

Yet such nerdish behaviour is completely believable of these crazy Canucks. Mike and Doug are 30-something lifelong pals who dream big but still get excited about extra bacon, office movie nights and playing in marathon video game competitions.

Mike, awkward and prematurely grey, and Doug, wired and headband-wearing, want to tap into continent-wide internet service to make real the prophecy of their high school shop teacher: “The person who puts a computer inside a phone will change the world.”

The problem is that Mike and Doug don’t have a clue how to bring their BlackBerry idea to fruition (they initially think of calling it PocketLink) or how to make and exploit a successful business deal, as they comically demonstrate when they fumble a huge modem sale to U.S. Robotics.

Enter Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton of TV’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”), the MVP of a crack ensemble cast, who becomes both hero and villain of the piece. The Harvard-educated and hair-deficient Jim, impatient and explosive, has the permanent look of a man who has just discovered that his car has been towed. He’s disdainful of geeks — he doesn’t even love “Star Wars”! — but he has the corporate moxie that RIM badly needs.

Jim informs a meekly compliant Mike and a sputtering Doug that they need to create, right now, a prototype he can shop around to the telecoms. Oh, and he also wants 50 per cent of the company and the title of CEO. (He settles for less and sharing co-CEO status with Mike.)

The RIM nerds race to fashion a (barely) working BlackBerry prototype out of spare parts and toys while Jim starts barnstorming the big U.S. telecoms for a network deal, despite not really understanding how this outlandish new device works.

“You’re not a tech guy, are you?” a Bell Atlantic exec named Woodman (Saul Rubinek) calmly inquires, after Jim attempts to BS a board meeting with razzle-dazzle of how they’re “selling self-reliance” rather than communications. Fortunately, Mike is a tech guy and he’s able to convince the Bell suits that RIM and BlackBerry are worth gambling on.

History records and the film shows with restless camera moves what happens next. The BlackBerry smartphone becomes the ultimate business tool — even U.S. presidents have one — and status symbol. RIM (later renamed BlackBerry Ltd.) and Waterloo become synonymous with Canadian enterprise and achievement.

Success makes the RIM guys extremely wealthy but also changes their corporate culture and friendships. The biggest transformation happens to Mike, who gets contact lenses, coiffed hair and suits, and begins acting like the corporate shark that Jim has always been (a comparison to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” comes to mind here).

The biggest change of all happens in 2007 when Apple’s Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone, a device Mike disdains as “an over-designed, trying-to-do-too-much toy” that doesn’t even have a physical keyboard.

Apple is out not to eat Mike’s breakfast bacon but rather his lunch — the iPhone becomes the new communications status symbol and BlackBerry begins its shocking plummet. In the space of less than 15 years, it plunges from owning nearly 50 per cent of the world’s smartphone market to its current share: zero per cent.

Along the way, BlackBerry had to fend off other challenges, including rapacious early competitor PalmPilot and SEC investigations into how the slippery stock deals used to woo top-dollar engineers were arranged. The closing-credits soundtrack of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” makes the best use of that song in a film ever.

Toronto filmmaker Johnson co-wrote the script with Matthew Miller, adapted from the book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry,” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff. A lot gets thrown at the screen, including Jim Balsillie’s first of several failed attempts to buy an NHL franchise, and it makes the movie hard to keep up with at times.

“Blackberry” is nevertheless a new career peak for Johnson, who has played with the documentary form in his splendid previous films, “The Dirties” and “Operation Avalanche.”

He now finds gold in the tragicomic account of how “the best phone in the world” became just another piece of plastic junk in a desk drawer.

My love affair with BlackBerry phones

Like many BlackBerry cultists, I used to swear they’d have to pry my treasured “CrackBerry” out of my cold, dead hands.

That’s how much I loved and depended on the smartphone that was my favourite tech device of the past 20 years. I had at least eight BlackBerrys in various incarnations, from the early Model 850 email pager of the early 21st century to the final BlackBerry of all, the Android-driven Key2 smartphone, released in 2018.

Having phone, email and camera in one device made the BlackBerry essential for any journalist. But it was the physical keyboard that sealed the deal for me. I found it easy to type with two thumbs — a BlackBerry design innovation — and I loved the “satisfying click” of the keys, as someone calls it in Matt Johnson’s new “BlackBerry” film.

Even after Apple’s iPhone arrived to snatch the smartphone crown from BlackBerry, I remained a loyal member of the BB fold. That’s somewhat surprising, since I’ve long been an Apple fanboy, having bought my first of many Macs in 1984 and having been the first kid on the block to own an iPod and an iPad. In my opinion, the iPhone has always been a dud because it has inferior wireless connectivity to the BlackBerry, and the iPhone’s lack of a real keyboard is a huge drag; I hate typing on glass.

I used to rock my BlackBerry like a “Star Wars” lightsaber. I could file a story to the Star from anywhere, including the Cannes, Sundance and Toronto film festivals, because my CrackBerry felt like an extension of my hands. No other smartphone felt so good and I’ve tried ’em all.

I got so good at typing on it that about 10 years ago I began a Thursday night tradition I called the “BlackBerry spanking.” The big movie studios went through a phase back then where they delayed showing certain films to critics until Thursday evenings, mere hours before public screenings began. The studios were trying to avoid bad reviews for their most dodgy films (a faint hope in the age of social media) by screening them after the deadlines of most print journalists.

But the Star had later deadlines then and with my CrackBerry I could hammer out a short one-star pan of a bad movie while the credits rolled to alert the masses, hence my term BlackBerry spanking. On rare occasions there would be a good movie that received my BlackBerry blessing.

It was invigorating and among the many reasons why I kept my BlackBerry long after they ceased to be cool. People would gawk at me using one in public as if I were still employing a 1980s brick cellphone. (Back in the ’80s, I used those, too.)

BlackBerry’s demise as a smartphone maker was long in coming. (It’s only a software firm now.) Its end became official in late 2021 when the company announced it would “decommission the legacy services” for most of its product line beginning in January 2022. The telecoms were also cutting bait, especially in the U.S., where BlackBerry wireless coverage was simply being severed altogether.

I got many extra months out of my Key2 BlackBerry because it still worked in Canada. But by late last fall, I finally had to admit defeat when it became apparent that essential security updates would no longer be offered for my device.

The CrackBerry wasn’t pried out of my hands, after all. It just died in them. I switched to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip4, which folds up to fit in my pocket. It’s pretty cool, but it’s no BlackBerry.

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