Beginning in the late ’90s and throughout most of the ’00s, I was a devoted Nokia fan, and my first four mobile phones were all Nokias. But the Finnish tech giant stumbled around 2010. Its operating system was buggy, its app store was sorely lacking, and its new lines of phones looked and felt cheap. Like many of its diehard customers, when it came time to buy a new phone, I looked elsewhere and I never looked back. Though Nokia phones are still around, I don’t know anyone who uses one today. It’s not the same company that it once was.

BlackBerry followed a similar trajectory. Produced by the Canadian company, Research In Motion, BlackBerry once held 45 percent of the mobile phone market. (Nokia’s market share was 38 percent at the same time.) BlackBerry was so successful, and its full QWERTY keyboard so addictive to use, that many people jokingly referred to it as a “CrackBerry”. Like Nokia though, RIM underestimated the mass market appeal of Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market with its candy bar-shaped, multi-featured, colour display, touchscreen iPhone, and in its attempt to play catch up, it messed up big time. Today, BlackBerrys can only be found in museums and at the backs of desk drawers everywhere.

Research In Motion’s meteoric rise and fall is recounted in the aptly named film, BLACKBERRY. Written and directed by Matt Johnson (THE DIRTIES), who also plays RIM’s co-founder Doug Fregin, BLACKBERRY tracks the company’s rags to riches to rags story beginning in the mid-1990s when Fregin and childhood friend Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel (THE TROTSKY; TV’s FUBAR) were putting together modems out of a strip mall office in Waterloo, Ontario, along with a small bunch of fellow videogame-playing technogeeks. The Internet was in its infancy back then and the pair realized that if they could come up with a small, handheld device that could combine a telephone with email, they’d have a winning combination. They pitched their idea to Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton, TV’s IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA), who was the chief financial officer at a nearby construction services company, and although their presentation was a complete disaster, Balsillie saw the product’s potential. He took a financial stake in the company and came on board as co-CEO. Under Balsillie’s mercurial leadership, the company soon launched its first BlackBerry phone and it became an immediate hit with both consumers and telephone companies, the latter of which saw a new revenue stream for their business. RIM was riding high but this Canadian success story was not to last.

Unlike two other underdog stories to hit our screens in recent months, AIR and TETRIS, BLACKBERRY doesn’t have quite the same happy ending that the other two films have. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating and often humorous study of a company that built a better mousetrap only to be caught out by another company that built an even better mousetrap. Such is the nature of high tech though. I used to work for Nortel (Northern Telecom), which was also an industry leader. It, too, failed to adapt to the changing landscape and it died. (The movie doesn’t mention this but BlackBerry still exists and is doing quite well but it’s out of the mobile device business.)

Johnson gives the film a docudrama feel with handheld camera jerkiness and plenty of THE OFFICE-style fly-on-the-wall close ups where audiences can see the characters for all their foibles. He and Baruchel play up their characters’ nerdiness but it’s Howerton who steals the film with his hilarious male pattern baldness prosthetic and Balsillie’s eat or be eaten attitude. Michael Ironside (NOBODY; TOP GUN), who plays company enforcer Charles Purdy, is also a riot to watch.

As enjoyable and well made as BLACKBERRY is, I have to wonder about its broad audience appeal. Outside of Canadians or people who once owned a BlackBerry, I can’t imagine that there would be much interest in this film. On the other hand, there were a lot of BlackBerry owners…

BLACKBERRY is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

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