Film Review: BlackBerry is intriguing, but hardly a pocket link to the truth

Jay Baruchel, Michael Scott, James Tiskin, Matt Johnson, Ben Petrie, and Ethan Eng in BlackBerry.

• BlackBerry
• ★★★☆☆
• Cinema release

BlackBerry (15A) opens in Ontario in 1996 with ‘the boy genius’ Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and his boyhood pal Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) on the brink of inventing the ‘pocket link’ gizmo that will convert cellular phones into the industry-defining Blackberry smartphone.

Smart guys except when it comes to business, the duo hire Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), a corporate ‘shark’ who promptly installs himself as CEO of Research in Motion and sets the company on track to revolutionising how the world communicates. Will the goofy tech geeks and the hardnosed businessman live happily ever after?

You could always search on your Blackberry to find out, of course, but that might give away the latter stages of the plot — although, to be fair, Blackberry isn’t exactly obsessed with literal truth, and especially when it comes to the characterisations of its main players. 

Matt Johnson’s film, which was written by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff, and Johnson himself, is more interested in creating a conventional conflict between creatives and the bean counters who thwart their ambition, and if that means exaggerating the extent to which Lazaridis and Fregin were hapless dorks, and Balsillie a rapacious and foul-mouthed CEO, then so be it.

The main players are all solid, however, with Baruchel nicely quirky as the misunderstood genius Lazaridis, but ultimately Blackberry is yet another tale dark fable of megalomania and untrammelled greed in corporate America.