Rating: R | Runtime: 120 minutes
Release Date: May 12th, 2023 (Canada/USA)
Studio: Elevation Pictures / IFC Films
Director(s): Matt Johnson
Writer(s): Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller / Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff (book Losing the Signal)

Well, “Good Enough” is the enemy of humanity.

Jack Manishen (Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll) was spot-on when assessing Apple’s projections on the first iPhone: my BlackBerry Bold was indeed “the phone I had before I switched to Apple.” Because, as Jim Balsillie (Glen Howerton) posits, AT&T knew what they were doing. By pivoting telecommunications away from minutes and onto data, they were shifting the economics of the industry to a place where RIM and BlackBerry became obsolete overnight.

If I’m going to be paying for data anyway, I might as well buy the more expensive unit to ensure the quality of what I’m using that data for is worth the cost. It’s still insane to imagine how you go from a 45% market share to 0% so quickly, though—more so when you consider all the legitimately wild innovations Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and his team problem-solved between company movie nights. Well, Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry seeks to help make it make sense.

Adapted by Johnson and Matthew Miller from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book Losing the Signal, you’d be forgiven for wondering if this fictionalization would be a full-on farce. The trailers have Baruchel with huge silver hair and Howerton in a bald-cap, fast-paced edits for comedic effect, and a collection of jokes to give even the most gullible person pause when considering veracity. But after watching the finished result, I can confidently say it proves more biopic than satire.

Yes, it’s a comedy with comedic actors in traditionally serious roles, but it plays more like a Canadian The Social Network than a spoof like Walk Hard. This is the story of two best friends (Lazaridis and Johnson’s Doug Fregin) hitching a ride on corporate shark Balsillie’s promises to both find the astronomical success they couldn’t achieve on their own and the destructive force of ego that had yet to consume them whole.

They’ve built a nice simple journey through the chaos too, deftly moving from 1996 origins to 2003 explosion to 2007 implosion. We see the passage of time via the changing attitudes of the characters—namely Lazaridis gradually becoming more like Balsillie than his former self ever would have believed possible. Details like the name are ignored (beyond mention that the original, more literal moniker wasn’t marketable) so that the rushed thrills of Balsillie setting impossible deadlines for the engineers to somehow hit anyway become the main focus.

If you want to know those nuances, you can look them up. Johnson is trying to entertain with the pitfalls of hubristic over-reach, loss of idealism, and ticking time bombs of revenge-fueled, illegal poaching. Add the NHL and PalmPilot’s involvement in the circus and you really get a big picture look at greed’s propensity to destroy morality and plain old common sense.

Baruchel and Johnson are great. The latter’s Doug is a goof, but he’s not a moron. He knows his friend better than anyone and serves as Mike’s conscience above partner in RIM endeavors. We need him to be over-the-top and all over the place so that we can see how far Mike falls once “fun” is no longer able to be the hard reset it once was. But if I were to single out one performer, it would be Howerton.

He’s able to package the absurdity of his “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” energy into a business suit with perfect comedic timing and dramatic gravitas depending on what the situation demands. I would have actually liked more of the evolution of his relationship with Mike during the time skips because they do seem to really soften while getting on the same page when a common goal of success is forged. Not having it doesn’t make their final interaction any less authentic, though. Because, in the end, tech’s volatility demands sinking ships leveraged to the hilt. Casualties were inevitable.

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Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in Matt Johnson’s BLACKBERRY. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.