'BlackBerry' Is A Riveting Cautionary Tale
Matt Johnson's scrappy film spotlights the history of the very first smartphone.
The first time I held a BlackBerry in my palm, I felt a surge of pride. I had made it! I was officially Important, taking numbers and breaking news for The Associated Press but mostly getting yelled at by Lindsay Lohan’s publicist. (Ah, 2007.) The AP’s bosses had distributed the handheld devices to the entertainment department, and after leaving work I kept my BlackBerry close, waiting for new emails to spring up. (A dopamine rush.) I would type with my thumbs on the little keyboard, just as Lohan and Paris Hilton and Anna Wintour and Barack Obama did.
It was the beginning of the smartphone and the end of a certain peace. The BlackBerry, a fully encrypted mobile phone that sent emails and texts, made the workplace run more efficiently. It also meant that your boss could find you anywhere, anytime. It was an Aughts status symbol, the gadget version of a Hervé Léger bandage dress or a Takashi Murakami-Louis Vuitton handbag, and as a striving twenty-something in the media world, I wasn’t impervious to the phone’s sleek mystique. Ironically, the company’s founders, a geeky group of Canadian engineers based outside Toronto, had pioneered the innovation in telecommunications.
Earlier this week, I caught a screening of BlackBerry, a buzzy new movie about the invention of the game-changer, at Lucasfilm’s San Francisco headquarters, pretty much the ideal setting for a tech-centric period piece that references Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Matt Johnson, its goofball director, writer and star, accepted the SFFILM Festival’s fancy Sloan Science on Screen Prize while wearing gray sweatpants rolled up to his knees and a blue elastic headband around his forehead. After warming up the room with jokes and praise for the city’s Boba Guys tea shop, Johnson turned serious: “Just do anything you can to get your films made because it is a hell march that never ends.”
BlackBerry premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February and South by Southwest in March. It will be released in theaters through IFC Films on May 12. I purposely avoided reading reviews beforehand, so I had no expectations. (I prefer it that way!) Within seconds of the movie starting, I wanted to walk out. The camera refuses to sit still. It shifts focus with head-spinning speed. It uses a long lens to spy on actors as they scheme and squirm and reenact the meteoric rise and fall of Research in Motion (RIM), the startup behind the device that peaked in the mid-2000s before Apple released the touchscreen iPhone, which really changed everything, transforming the BlackBerry into an ancient relic in real time. In one fell swipe. The two men who go down with their product are creator Mike Lazaridis, whom Baruchel plays as brilliant but ultimately shortsighted, and his co-CEO Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), an odious opportunist who strong-arms his way into RIM’s offices, where adult engineers behave like giddy man-boys, bonding through shared interests and Spielberg movie nights, treating their space like a madcap science lab — throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. They’re funny, weird, and easy to root for, and that is how BlackBerry hooked me (once my eyes adjusted to Johnson’s kinetic style). Very few films and TV shows about technology history successfully capture the visceral thrill of creation, that feeling of building something new, of playing in a sandbox (or a garage in Palo Alto) without much supervision. Ten years ago, Ashton Kutcher (ha!) vainly channeled the late Steve Jobs in a miscast biopic that amounted to hero worship. Then in 2015, Michael Fassbender slipped on a black turtleneck for the Aaron Sorkin-penned Steve Jobs, a more convincing effort that was not especially fun to watch. The HBO parody Silicon Valley was fun to watch yet heartless. The Social Network was a supervillain origin story. The Dropout was a horror show. On the contrary, BlackBerry is a cautionary tale that pulls you in the room with the inventors and makes you feel like you were there — from takeoff to trainwreck. Its light touch makes you laugh out loud, even when the ship starts to sink, and a series of bad decisions hastens RIM’s demise. The tagline on the poster: Work Hard. Fail Hard.
Johnson plays RIM co-founder Douglas Fregin. His actors hated him throughout the film shoot because he wanted to improvise and gather candid moments for the edit bay. As a result, they were understandably confused and frustrated without structure or a sense of discipline governing the set. That chaos mirrored the BlackBerry’s founding (see the nonfiction source material: Losing the Signal by journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff). With artfully unsteady hands, Johnson unearths kernels of truth regarding the downside of startup success, as when humorless men take over a scaled-up RIM, applying pressure and perhaps stifling creativity. For me, BlackBerry asks: When does a dream job become a hell march? How can an ambitious creative learn the ropes of business without losing himself (and his friends) in the process?
Hailing from Toronto, the 37-year-old Johnson grew up outside Hollywood and made a name in his home country directing the low-budget independent films The Dirties and Operation Avalanche. When he was approached to helm BlackBerry, he didn’t want the gig at first. He never had a BlackBerry back in the day. His father used one for work, though, and Johnson associated the phone with Boring Dad Stuff. Gradually, however, he found a personal connection to the unauthorized biographies of Lazaridis, Balsillie and Fregin.
“In fact, I connected with them so strongly that I wound up basically sublimating three parts of my personality into the three of them, into Mike, Doug, and Jim,” he told me on Monday. “And then basically having internal arguments with my own psyche through these three characters, mostly around the fundamental nature of work. And that's like, why is it that we go to work? Why is work meaningful to us? And what does work do for you? And I think each of these three guys has a different, very sincere opinion on that. And this movie is about which of those is most valid, or if any of them on their own is valid without the other two.”
Without clear-cut heroes and villains, BlackBerry offers more questions than answers and lets the viewer decide who’s right and wrong. The gray areas are often the most illuminating. The trailer below:
Special shout-outs this Wednesday to:
*Brendan Hunt, a.k.a. Ted Lasso’s wise, whimsical Coach Beard, who wrote this week’s sublime “Sunflowers” episode. It is television for the ages!
*Authors Kirthana Ramisetti and Christina Wallace on the publication of their must-have books. Kirthana’s suspense novel, Advika and the Hollywood Wives, kept me up well past my bedtime. And Christina’s The Portfolio Life: How to Future-Proof Your Career, Avoid Burnout, and Build a Life Bigger Than Your Business Card is an invaluable guide to achieving balance. (BlackBerry’s Mike Lazaridis really needed it way back when.)
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