FILM REVIEW: BlackBerry (2023) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Blackberry is a Canadian biopic about the rise and fall of the world’s first smartphone, with Jay Baruchel, Matt Johnson and Glenn Howerton.

The film is funny and endearing yet tense. It follows the inventors of the smartphone Mike Lazaridis (Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) as they try to make it in the cut-throat world of big tech.

Mike and Doug, have a very casual, inexperienced attitude to business. They and their tech/nerdy team act more like a bunch of friends than a competitive outfit, so, in serious debt, Mike reaches out to the ambitious Jim Balsillie (played commandingly by Glenn Howerton) to help sort them out. He comes in and immediately clashes with Doug.

But with Jim’s edge and drive, they stop wandering blindly and insecurely through the world, and so starts the meteoric rise of the Blackberry.

Blackberry is soft-centred and you root for all the characters, whether the geeky underdogs of the office or the angry Jim trying to pull all their metaphorical socks up so they can get the phone to market before anyone gets there first.

It’s based on the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry by journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, and adapted by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller. Matt Johnson also directs.

Blackberry premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2023, having been made in just 8 months, and showed at Glasgow Film Festival 2023. Johnson also had two other films in Glasgow Film Festival 2023 (Therapy Dogs and The Dirties).