Blackberry

 

Actor / writer/ director Matt Johnson's film Blackberry is a hefty mix of cautionary tale and historical document that chronicles how the once ubiquitous Canadian smartphone came to life and how it was killed by Apple's iPhone.

Johnson plays second-banana / puppet-master Doug Fregin to Jay Baruchel's Mike Lazaridis, Fregin's brilliant bestie and former fellow engineering student at University of Windsor. They founded Research in Motion in 1984, employing other computer geeks in Waterloo, Ontario, to create circuit boards and modems for larger companies -- and watch classic fanboy films on Movie Night.

When discovered by the ethically challenged Jim Balsillie (a terrifically unhinged Glenn Howerton), RIM is deeply in debt and being strung along by big firms intent on stealing their ideas. He buys into co-ownership of RIM and commits to making them all rich.

Though slimy and unprincipled, Balsillie is indeed a rainmaker for RIM, pushing Fregin and Lazaridis to move forward on a smartphone prototype that he will pitch to Verizon and that will eventually be called the Blackberry. (The source of the name is a tiny bit of understated genius.)

Balsillie drums up business with the kind of jet-setting hyperbole and corner-office profanity that makes the ears of decent people bleed. But he delivers and over-commits RIM time and time again. He's incorrigible and greedy and the best thing to happen to RIM -- until he isn't.

This entertaining picture's narrative of a David becoming a Goliath intercuts passages about the science of communication technology with sections about the unsavory aspects of this schizophrenic first-world sector, where socially challenged outcasts put the rest of the world in touch with one another in mere milliseconds.

Baruchel, under a stringy silver wig and behind face-framing plastic aviators, personifies this dichotomy, evolving over the course of the film from meek "idea man" to an icy mercenary. It's a fascinating, and chilling, metamorphosis.