BlackBerry

This marks my one hundredth movie review for the blog! I only launched just over ten months ago, so that feels like an acheivment. Big thanks to anyone who’s checked out my movie thoughts: it means a lot.

One of the strangest phenomenons in movies this year has been the number entries in the Corporate Cinematic Universe, a term I’ve been using ever since seeing Thomas Flight’s Letterboxd list. To put it more plainly, they’re “corporate biopics”: biopics most interested in companies and/or products. They may get at this through the lens of the creator(s), so they can claim a personal bent, but the film doesn’t seem to care much about them or their journey. Of course, the corporate biopic isn’t new. All modern examples share The Social Network as their foundational text, even if older instances exist. There have been a number of swings in the past decade, such as The Founder (about McDonald’s) and House of Guchi and two about Steve Jobs, amongst others. From this year alone, we’ve got Air, as well as Tetris, Flamin’ Hot, and The Beanie Bubble. And next year, none other than Jerry Seinfeld will be gracing us with Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.

Which I find exhausting. Biopics are already a tricky genre. On the one hand, you want access to primary materials to enable a more authentic experience. But to get it, you almost certainly need the blessing of the subject (or their estate), which they’re unlikely to give unless you paint them in the rosiest of lights. When lionizing a person, it’s boring, and rises to borderline irresponsible when instead bolstering a company. Biopics already must inherently leave out details to make a compelling narrative, and with corporations, that will almost certainly mean papering over unethical behavior. See the way the use of sweatshops is acknowledged in Air: as a single line tossed off as a joke.

As such, I was in no rush to see BlackBerry. I dismissed early good reviews as coming from the same people who told me Tetris was awesome. But as the months have worn on, the positive reactions have piled up, so I figured I should catch it before year’s end. Well, it’s December, so here goes nothing.

BlackBerry tells the story of the titular device through the relationship between RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and the CEO who came on board to launch it, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). RIM isn’t exactly thriving at the time: despite a revolutionary idea, a great team, and an absolutely brilliant technical mind in Lazaridis, they have no clients and just got screwed over on a contract by USRobotics. The competing styles of management end up working wonders: Lazaridis and his co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson) keep the vibe loose and engaging while making technical progress, and Balsillie plays the role of shark to scare away the pirates, making aggressive deals and generally punching well above their weight.

But there’s a reason no one has thought about BlackBerry in fifteen years (ten if you allow for laughing at their cheesy REO Speedwagon parody from 2012). They owned the 00s, but it all went wrong by the end of the decade. So what happened?

That right there already presents the element of the BlackBerry story that is different from so many of the CCU movies which came before. McDonald’s is the most popular restaurant in the world. Nike is the most popular shoe in the world. Nintendo makes one of the three major game consoles, and Tetris remains a beloved game by casual and hardcore gamers alike. These are the origin stories of behemoths. Sure, they began with people who may deserve recognition. But each movie is focused on selling the success of the company as an unmitigated good. Nike doesn’t want us to think about how their profits are made by child labor, nor McDonald’s about how they underpay their staff and add to the strain on the country’s limited social safety net. I’m not interested in celebrating Nintendo, no matter how much enjoyment I get from their products.

But BlackBerry has tragedy and intrigue built in. RIM began as a scrappy collection of desks, grew to dominate the market with a tremendous market cap, and then were brought down by their arrogance. This movie refuses to be a celebration, even when it lauds certain aspects or people or ideas: it’s fundamentally a cautionary tale. A story about how striving for greater and greater success means abandoning your principles, and maintaining your power means selling your soul.

When Balsillie demands a prototype to show to Bell Atlantic on a crazy short time scale, Mike insists on creating something perfect, or else not at all. When Balsillie asks him if he’s ever heard the phrase “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”, Mike’s retort is iconic: “Yeah, well…good enough is the enemy of humanity”.

From that lofty ideal, we watch as Mike gets more and more involved in the corporate side of things, eventually changing his whole appearance to emulate what he thinks a CEO is supposed to look like. By the time of the iPhone announcement in 2007, his separation from the tech side is complete. Which makes it all the more poignant and painful when shortly afterwards, finishing their newest demo contains many utterances of just that phrase: “Good enough”.

Driving this home even further is Baruchel’s incredible performance. He truly disappears into Mike, becoming soft spoken, awkward, quiet, and unsure of himself. His mannerisms and verbal ticks may or may not be accurate to the real man (I honestly don’t know), but they work to sell this character as not belonging to this business world. This seeming lack of confidence makes it all the more impactful and impressive when Mike comes alive in that first Bell Atlantic meeting, correctly guessing their failed approach and detailing why BlackBerry’s will work. Baruchel nails that transformation, still feeling like exactly the same character, just one in his element. When we eventually get to 2007, it’s clear Mike has undergone a personal transformation, which translates in Baruchel’s performance as manifesting from an interior shift and the experience of co-running a massively successful company. He carries himself differently and is quicker to snap at people, in addition to the obvious physical changes.

If I’ve made this sound like a dour, serious, intense film, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. The film is incredibly heightened from top to bottom, from beginning to end. Mike looks and acts like a cross between Nathan Fielder and Joe Pera, and Doug looks like Andy Samberg about to hit the gym. Balsillie is constantly screaming in impotent rage over the stupidest things. This is primarily a comedy, poking fun at businesspeople and tech culture and the wealthy and everything. I was laughing out loud throughout the film, triggered by subtle comments and facial expressions to big explosions of emotion and clear irony. The writing here is gold.

Part of what makes it so good is how they always look for the joke which also serves to further the character’s development. A lot of thought clearly went into who said each line, whether in the main cast or a random background character. As such, when the movie slows down for an emotional beat or to build or break tension, we feel it, because we know who these people are.

I was truly reluctant to watch this. I almost put it on a handful of times over the past few months, but repeated failed to find it in me to get excited. Even this time. But I hope I’ve made the case that my acquiescence was rewarded. Yes, this is ultimately still a CCU movie. But it nimbly avoids almost every single pitfall that drags down the others, looking at the situation with clear eyes and refusing to spare anyone from criticism. It’s fun, it’s tense, it’s fascinating, and it says something bigger about corporate America. Not new, no, but very effectively lands its message about hubris. And in doing so, makes a case for its inclusion alongside the very best of the year.