The resulting partnership is never one where Lazaridis and Balsillie warm to each other over drinks. Instead, these two men are incapable of doing the thing their opposite is skilled at, and they stay out of each other’s way. Their synergy is uncharismatic even as both actors are, in very different ways. Baruchel has played serious before, but never as fully embodied as this, where Lazaridis is never totally comfortable and has the body language to show it. Howerton is a fuming alpha male whose rude honesty is a welcome relief to the slimy corporate hacks at larger companies who try to swat down RiM for no other reason than because they can. Left outside is Fregin, brought to doughy life by Johnson. His interests are always the maintenance of his nice little life, and the protection of Lazaridis a few steps behind that. There’s a lived-in sense between the two, where they were both nerds together in childhood but the beefy Fregin could fight off the hockey stick wielding goons while Lazaridis cowered in the corner. The three interests of making the best product, dominating the competition, and creating a fun work environment keep clashing, with each principal on the rise and fall arc along with RiM itself.
A company achieving major success and then failing to innovate beyond its original idea is interesting for a Fortune cover story, but what guarantees BlackBerry’s cinematic success is how trapped its characters become. Lazaridis has simple goals; make a great product that meets a high standard. He’s thwarted at every stage, and the way that Baruchel makes these defeats and compromises into a personal blow is a reliable source of pathos. Very quickly, BlackBerry becomes a Faustian story where short-term success is achieved by guaranteeing long-term failure down the road, such that the noble goal was always impossible. Balsillie is necessary to fend off takeovers and cons that Lazaridis and Fregin were walking into, but his ill-suited nature to a tech company means that he’ll get distracted and be somewhere else when it counts. The capitalist god of the movie is watching overhead, throwing thunderbolts when it’s time for him to collect.
As classically star-crossed as the story comes off, this is also a frequently hilarious movie. Howerton’s eruptions and flabbergasted expressions do a lot of the work here, but so does Fregin’s strange combination of nerd and bro. The film’s events trend toward the absurd, and Johnson’s tone rises, or sinks, to meet them. However, it’s Baruchel who is the big revelation, sympathetic as a man who can only express himself through his engineering. Watching him take in a situation that he deems insufficient, consider what to do about it, and then mentally recognize that he is not capable of turning it around is tough every time, but Baruchel keeps the character from being pathetic. There’s something in his portrayal that prevents Lazaridis from being a figure of fun, and it elevates BlackBerry from a satire into a tragedy. To the extent that Air and Flamin Hot have anything to do with this film other than a similar release date, BlackBerry’s the only one that leaves the viewer with anything approaching genuine feelings towards the central company. There’s something amazing about a tech company that does local manufacturing in a midsize Canadian city beating up on the Silicon Valley big boys. A charmless, white-haired dork who can’t speak up for himself seduced me. This film works. A-