[imagesource: IFC Films]

Most of us will fondly recall the satisfying thumb-click of our first BlackBerry.

The combination of “pager, cellphone and email machine” revolutionised modern communications, and then, just like that, the little powerhouse was gone.

Now it is just thought of as that thing you owned before you got an iPhone.

That line is taken almost verbatim from the movie BlackBerry, which follows a rags-to-riches-back-to-rags story arc serving as a cautionary tale and a nostalgic look back at the times when we didn’t have a device glued to us like a fifth limb.

The film is in a mock-documentary style reminiscent of The Office, where director Matt Johnson takes us on a journey filled with “jolts of manic energy and pop nostalgia that are both alarming and soothing” per The Washington Post‘s three-star review.

Johnson plays Doug Fregin, who as “BlackBerry” opens is accompanying his colleague and best friend Mike Lazaridis on dog-and-pony calls in hopes of finding financial backing for the newest invention from Research in Motion, the data technology company they run out of a disheveled office in a Waterloo, Ontario, office park. Fregin is a mop-topped gaming fan with the bedside manner of the guy in the record store who reflexively sneers at your musical taste; the more mild-mannered, prematurely gray Lazaridis is his polar opposite, stammering and underselling himself until the duo is inevitably shown the door.

Then they meet Jim Balsillie, a corporate shark played by Glenn Howerton, “head shaved to resemble a heat-seeking bullet”, who spins the Blackberry wheel of fortune into overly ambitious territory, which at once looked on the verge of world domination, and then, it fell into the tech void.

Apple lurks like the great white in “Jaws” while the engineers revel in their good fortune and Balsillie goes berserk trying to buy hockey teams and, at one point, the American NHL; picture “Succession” or “Billions” with better manners and more poutine, and you get the idea of “BlackBerry’s” appealing combination of antic comedy and wistful moral comeuppance.

Johnson’s homage to the smartphone that started it all looks like a fun watch. Take a look at the trailer:

Blackberry is out in theatres already.

[source:washingtonpost]