Tech impressarios are in great demand: Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs have been at the center of films, the creators behind Uber, WeWork and Theranos have been featured on TV, in films, that is often a mixture of strange nostalgia and capitalist enthusiasm. Now there’s BLACKBERRY, with the inventors of the eponymous smartphone at the center, who in the early 2000s had the then revolutionary idea to send emails on their phone. The story of the company „Research in Motion“ in Canadian Ontario doesn’t start in a garage, but almost. Founders Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson, who also directs) were genuine nerds, filled with ideas but with no sense for business. Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) is who brought that into the company – at least in this film version, which of course only partially corresponds to reality – a cocky, uber confident manager who gets the nerds going.

Using a nice low-fi aesthetic, Matt Johnson depicts this story of the rise of the nerds who did big business for a few years – until Apple came on the market with the iPhone and introduced the now ubiquitous touch screen. The fact that Blackberry failed to some degree, or was at least surpassed by the competition, has a strange effect: unlike the ostensibly evil, really capitalist companies from the US, this Canadian company that started out small seems almost humble, affable, and uninfluenced by the profit motive. But even though they’re the losers of their film biography, you don’t need to worry about the three founders too much: the fortune of the “poorest“ of the three is estimated to be around 800 million dollars, the other two are billionaires.

Michael Meyns (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy