Millennial Wall Street

 

BLACKBERRY (A-minus) - Matt Johnson has established himself as the master of the flashback process movie. He previously imagined NASA in the late '60s faking the moon landing in "Operation Avalanche," and now he starts in the mid-'90s to tell the story of the BlackBerry device, the once-ubiquitous attachment to rich assholes everywhere before the company crashed and burned through malfeasance and a little device that came along called the iPhone.

Johnson stars as Doug, one of the co-founders of Canadian start-up Research In Motion, along with Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis, the visionary behind the outfit. If Mike is an idiot-savant, Doug is more of an idiot. He sports a red headband at all times, even the one time he has to don a suit to impress other suits. Doug speaks almost exclusively in dialogue from classic movies. He lives for Movie Night at the office, quoting along with dialogue.

Their fledgling operation is soon taken over by an opportunistic and brazen CEO, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who immediately gets them in the door at Bell Atlantic, to pitch their PocketLink device, based on a crude prototype, slapped together literally overnight. 

Throughout the film, RIM has to walk a fine line between flooding the market with BlackBerries and not overwhelming the systems they run on. In 2007, the iPhone came along -- building the keyboard into the screen instead of having a click keyboard -- and the downfall of BlackBerry was swift and messy.

Johnson -- writing with Matthew Miller -- borrows a little from HBO's "Silicon Valley" (the nerds often riding to the rescue of the reckless CEO) and a bit from "Wall Street" (Balsillie poached top techies from Google and elsewhere, using an accounting trick with stock options that caught the eye of the SEC). His visual style has a shaky documentary feel to it, but is not afraid of drone shots of skylines, either. Baruchel is dead-on as the spectrum-y tech whiz (he eventually morphs, not unlike Steve Jobs, into a Jim Jarmusch-like spiritual guru), and the bromance between Mike and Doug is touching. 

Johnson's narrative hurtles along at break-neck speed, as one liners shoot out and land with ease. When reminded that "perfect is the enemy of the good," Mike claps back, "Well, good enough is the enemy of humanity." We already know that this is going to end in corporate tragedy, but that doesn't take away any of the entertainment value. Maybe it's the Canadian sensibility, the over-arching self-deprecation, that makes this all so delicious.

Some people are born storytellers. There's a Tarantino-esque DYI confidence to Johnson's filmmaking. It is a perfect match of this story that needed to be told, and done so without a heavy hand.

BONUS TRACKS

The film kicks off with the nervous energy of Elastica's "The Connection" over the opening credits:

When the film advances to 2003, the Strokes chime in with the infectious "Someday":

 

When things start to fall get out of control, the White Stripes charge in with "Hello Operator":