In one of the early, pivotal moments of BlackBerry, a dramedy biopic about the implosion of the once-beloved smartphone that screened at SXSW Monday, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) sit in silence in a yellow cab. They are en route to the most important business meeting of their lives. On the radio—improbably—plays a song that a certain group of post-rock, ’90s midwestern emo-lovers know well: “Good Morning, Captain” by Slint, a group of 21-year-old Kentuckians that broke up just before their only record was released.
“Good Morning, Captain” has earned legacy status for, in part, its haunting backstory. The recording session for the song, the final track on Slint’s first-and-last album Spiderland, was such a visceral experience that lead singer Brian McMahan got physically ill after they finished. But the song is most memorable for its incredible ending. Six-and-a-half minutes into the nearly eight-minute piece, McMahan’s mumbled vocals become painfully clear: “I’ll make it up to you,” he sings. “I’ll make it up to you.”
Then, a painfully long build-up toward those final three words, which McMahan screams at the top of his lungs: “I miss you!” Over and over again, “I miss you.”
It’s gorgeous, it’s painful, it’s cathartic—it’s one of the most honest, vulnerable moments ever committed to tape. And for BlackBerry to employ the song, even if only its instantly recognizable, mounting intro, feels telling. “Good Morning, Captain” is lingua franca for a certain viewer, to telegraph what co-writer/director Matt Johnson perhaps wants to frame this movie as: the story of a devastating breakup.
And BlackBerry does, in ways, suggest itself as a breakup picture. That’s what’s given early reviews’ pat, reductive comparisons to The Social Network some heft. But BlackBerry is as much about self-immolation as it is deterioration of relationships at the hands of hubris—and it’s that dramatic, tragic balance that makes it more interesting than simply another entry in the growing tech company biopic genre.
Johnson co-stars as Doug Fregin, co-founder of the Waterloo, Ontario-based company Research in Motion (RIM). It’s 1996 when we meet him and his nebbish best friend/fellow founder Mike, and the pair is in clear, but unstated, dire straits. It’s why they’re at Jim Balsillie’s office, preparing a poorly written speech about why the Big Bald Business Bro should invest in their pie-in-the-sky tech product. Or, at least, it sounds like a pie-in-the-sky doohickey to Balsillie, who is less interested in the nerds and more interested in chasing a promotion at his current company.
But there is something about these nerds that sticks with Balsillie, which is why he shows up at Research in Motion’s makeshift workspace the next day. He wants to work with them, he announces—he wants to help them take their idea and make it into the biggest piece of tech ever created.
That idea is what becomes known as the BlackBerry, which purports itself to be the first smartphone. Thanks to Mike’s uniquely expert tech prowess, RIM is able to create something that the world hadn’t seen before: a phone that does email quickly and securely, on the go and at no added cost to users. It even has a full-fledged keyboard on it, to make both emailing and texting more accessible than on any other device out there.
With Mike’s engineering smarts and Jim’s ruthless, indefatigable business sense, RIM grows from a tiny group of movie buffs and wise guys into a billion-dollar company. There are years of profound success: Jim and Mike's win over the skeptical folks at Bell Atlantic after that fateful NYC cab ride; hiring top engineers at Google, Sony, and beyond; and preventing a hostile takeover from competitor PalmPilot. But then things grind to a halt. It just so happened that in 2007, a little gadget called the iPhone came out to shake things up.
But that big battle of little phones, which we know the BlackBerry loses, appears in the film’s third act. Instead of fixating primarily upon the company’s failure, BlackBerry works hard to get us to root for its success. There’s an inherent scrappiness not just to the boys at RIM, but the movie itself, which lends itself well to an underdog story. In telling that story, though, the film vacillates between two quite different modes: broad, subtle bromance comedy and intimate character study of two very different men, whose hubris is their downfall.
Much of this back-and-forth comes down to Johnson’s trifecta of writer, director, and co-star, an inherent balance that he doesn’t always nail. As Doug, Johnson slathers on constant references to everything from They Live to Glengarry Glen Ross; RIM’s archetypically nerdy cohort of guys play Doom together on LAN. Meanwhile, Howerton’s Jim is starring in a more familiar, serious, Icarian anti-hero story; it’s a performance he nails, bald cap and all, but the tonal shifts can sometimes be a doozy to watch.
It’s the friendship between Doug and Mike in particular that doesn’t quite work as a narrative pillar, with Doug’s abrasively overprotective nature often feeling like a roadblock to his company and best friend’s success, not a legitimate act of friendship. This is not a Social Network-style dramedy, where it’s clear that the friendship-turned-business relationship of our tech geniuses is an emotional and professional trainwreck in slow motion. Instead, the bromance is more Apatowian than Fincher, at constant tension with the industry drama. When the film shows its hand as to which emotional through-line Johnson considers the primary one, it reads as a misjudgment of the film’s own narrative strengths.
Perhaps a tonal mishmash, however, is fitting for something as absurd as BlackBerry’s downfall. Johnson’s confident direction, as he guides the film both through these modes and stylistic flourishes, keeps the film steady and engrossing. With strong turns from Baruchel and Howerton in particular, the foregone conclusion of where RIM and BlackBerry end up remains tense, thrilling, and even sad. It’s almost tragic to watch Howerton’s Jim let a diss against his beloved hockey (a good Canadian boy!) from business rival and Palm exec Carl Yankowski (Cary Elwes) fuel his decision to start making wildly bad, very illegal financial choices with the NHL. And yet, that hockey fandom nearly destroyed the most popular smartphone the iPhone does make for some real absurdist humor.
With Jim and Mike giving into their worst impulses, as many fast-ascending businessmen tend to do, it may be best not to think of that “I’ll make it up to you!” as a promise from Mike to Doug, as seems Johnson’s intention. Perhaps it works best to take it literally; these dudes owe a bunch of money to a bunch of people by the end, a classic instance of pride getting the best of you. Even the biggest nerds are prone to the poison that is the biggest power grabs.
BlackBerry’s message, in the end, feels like a signal to the tech business writ large: Good morning, captains of industry! Here’s your wake-up call.
