Here is a punchy Canadian comedy-drama in that burgeoning true-life genre which could loosely be called Tech Startup Hubris; we’ve seen Dumb Money (about GameStop), WeCrashed (about WeWork), and The Beanie Bubble (about the bizarre 90s web-driven tulip-style craze for Beanie Babies). The great ancestor of them all is naturally David Fincher’s The Social Network, about Facebook, with its propulsive script by Aaron Sorkin. This film is a fictionally souped-up account of the steep rise and sudden fall of the BlackBerry, the handset device that towards the end of the 00s was so ubiquitous and addictive among the white-collar classes it was known as the “Crackberry”.
But then Steve Jobs unveiled his iPhone, and the BlackBerry executives suddenly looked like a bunch of brontosauruses that had been hit in the face by a meteor.
Jay Baruchel plays BlackBerry’s greying co-founder Mike Lazaridis; a shy, nerdy, brilliant innovator who is details-obsessive. Matt Johnson, who is the film’s director and co-writer, plays Mike’s goofball partner Doug Fregin, and Johnson’s directing duties perhaps meant he’d taken the eye off his own performance a little, as he does little other than stare with sweaty, slack-jawed and horrified incredulity at his buddy Mike selling out to the Man.
This latter is represented by gimlet-eyed investor Jim Balsillie, played by Glenn Howerton, almost unrecognisable from his role on TV’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; Balsillie is the uptight suit-wearing guy who gets these nerdy Star Wars-loving dopes and slackers into financial shape (while of course betraying their creative, fooling-around ethos). These three cartoony personae loosely correspond to Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker as portrayed in The Social Network; none of them, however, have a family or romantic life away from the office, an important part of how Sorkin conceived his characters.
Well, this is a watchable enough film; there is hilarious delusion in Balsillie’s fanatical desire to buy up hockey teams with his new superwealth, and pure pathos when the BlackBerry team watch Jobs demonstrating the iPhone, like silent movie veterans witnessing the new talkies, speaking out loud their own imminent demise.
• Blackberry is released on 6 October in UK and Irish cinemas.
