Jim Balsillie storms into a meeting room with Verizon executives. The new co-CEO of hardware company Research in Motion, Balsillie plans to pitch the telecom giant on his new device, a phone, messaging, and email combination that will come to be known as the BlackBerry. Balsillie’s determination only intensifies when his fellow CEO, the tech-minded Mike Lazaridis, flees the boardroom to retrieve a prototype that he had accidentally left behind.
“I’m all alone,” Balsillie tells himself before launching into his spiel. His eyes burn with arrogance as he belittles Verizon’s previous products, framing them as relics of an earlier time that focused largely on communication. “You’re not selling togetherness anymore,” Balsillie declares. “You’re selling self-reliance.”
Even if you haven’t yet seen BlackBerry, you can probably imagine the scene. For the past few decades, stories about bold and inventive executives have invaded popular culture, from the hit television series Mad Men to the moody Facebook movie The Social Network to the Danny Boyle-directed biopic Steve Jobs. In fact, two new entries in the genre were already released this year—the video game tale Tetris and Air, the story of Nike’s acquisition of Michael Jordan’s endorsement rights.
But the pitch scene in BlackBerry plays out very differently than in those other films. Instead of rewarding Balsillie’s brilliance with a hefty contract, the Verizon execs laugh at him. They can tell that he knows nothing about the actual product he’s hawking. It’s not until Lazardis returns with the prototype and explains how it works that the execs come to a deal. Balsillie succeeds precisely because he is not alone, even if he refuses to acknowledge it to himself.
Stories about American entrepreneurs are as old and fraudulent as our stories about discovery and the frontier—they are myths that revolve around an American Prometheus who steals fire from the gods and sells it to the people, turning a healthy profit.
Stories about American entrepreneurs are as old and fraudulent as our stories about discovery and the frontier—but BlackBerry has no such love for the corporate ethos.
But where earlier examples featured inventors who at least made their products, the modern version valorizes the pitch man. Working from a script by Aaron Sorkin, based on the biography by Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs makes it clear that Jobs (Michael Fassbender) himself didn’t build anything. The movie shows Jobs cajoling engineers Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) and Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) to make his concepts real, but Boyle’s optimistic direction cannot help but see the title character as anything but an audacious, if flawed, visionary.
A key scene in the Apple TV+ movie Tetris finds software exec Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) at an underground dance party in 1980s Russia. Rogers witnesses teens rebel against Soviet austerity by demanding Coca-Cola and Levis, realizing why he needs to help Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov), designer of the titular game, escape the U.S.S.R. Crushed by communism, these free thinkers need a man like Henk to bring them the freedom of purchasing power.
At first, Air director Ben Affleck seems to take a communal approach to this tale about the invention of Air Jordan shoes. The climactic scene brings together all of the key figures in Nike’s basketball department, who collectively pitch their shoe line to a young Michael Jordan and his parents (played by Damian Delano Young, Viola Davis, and Julius Tennon, respectively). But when exec Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who spearheaded the company’s pursuit of Jordan, fears that the group approach is losing the nineteen-year-old basketball player, he breaks from the crowd.
In a tearful monologue, Vaccaro tells Jordan about his future greatness, his superhuman abilities, the challenges he’ll face, and the triumph he’ll eventually achieve. Set to stirring music and intercut with video from throughout the player’s career, Vaccaro frames Jordan as a truly exceptional individual, whose very singularity will bring joy and even meaning to the masses who watch him. “It’s an American story, and Americans are gonna love it,” he promises.
Air’s presentation of Voccaro’s monologue captures the central ethos of a corporate hero movie: the masses can purchase imminence by buying the right brands. And those brands come not from the laborers who produce the product, but from individual geniuses—lone-wolf salesmen who see the needs that others cannot articulate.
BlackBerry has no such love for the corporate ethos.
Sure, Balsillie and Lazaris have their victories and eventually become successful billionaires. But director Matt Johnson, who co-wrote the script with Matthew Miller, adapting the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, is more interested in the duo’s comic march to ruin than in their brilliance.
With the same arrogance he perfected by playing sociopath Dennis Reynolds on the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for more than a decade, Glenn Howerton strips away the capitalist romance from Jim Balsillie. With a smirk and dead eyes peering out from his bald head, Howerton exposes the maverick approach valorized in other business biopics as ignorant bluster.
Initially, Balsillie seems like exactly what Research in Motion needs. Founders Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), Doug Fregin (Johnson), and their gaggle of nerdy engineers may have the technical knowhow, but these “goofs” (to use Balsillie’s dismissive term) lack all business sense. Balsillie demands that the team stop wasting time arguing about Star Trek on the Internet or playing video games, and commit to meeting his demands. Even when Lazaridis and Fregin tell him that they cannot produce what he wants, Balsillie ignores them, maintaining that he alone knows what he’s doing.
In the second act, Balsillie seems to be proven right. It opens following Balsillie into the luxuriously appointed BlackBerry offices in 2003, making snide remarks about his competitors and launching plans to purchase an NHL team. He only shows interest in the actual BlackBerry when his numbers start to slip. Balsillie stomps into the engineering room to find Lazaridis, Fregin, and the others working together to improve their network. Still surrounded by Star Wars memorabilia and geeking out about cult horror movies, the group operates as a team, a team that Balsillie cannot respect.
Johnson keenly accentuates this point by employing a cinéma vérité style, training his wobbly, handheld camera around bystanders and their stuff to capture his main characters. More than a mere compositional device, these extra elements in the frame remind the viewer of what Balsillie, and eventually Lazardis, forget: that making innovative products is a group effort.
While the movie gets its laughs by mocking Balsillie’s egoism, its drama comes from the tragedy of Mike Lazaridis. Played by Baruchel as a meek man with a coif of prematurely gray hair, Lazaridis initially cares only about his craft and his friends. His first scene finds him nearly derailing a pitch meeting to fix an annoying buzzing sound, a demonstration of the commitment to quality that he inspires in others.
Throughout the movie, Lazaridis speaks with pride about working on “the best phone in the world” with his cohorts. But that pride and communal attitude fades as he adopts Balsillie’s worldview, thinking himself better than the goofs in his community.
It’s no spoiler to say that BlackBerry ends in failure. Balsillie’s shortcomings have been well-publicized, from his ouster from Research in Motion after SEC violations to his repeated inability to acquire an NHL team. In 2013, Lazaridis left the company he helped found. The once-dominant BlackBerry phones officially ended service in January 2022, having been replaced by more popular devices such as the iPhone and Android. Today, BlackBerry Ltd. has nothing to do with the device that Lazardis and Fregin created with their engineers, focusing on cybersecurity and software, and having recently sold many of its non-core patents.
But the movie’s pleasures come not from these plot points. Rather, BlackBerry thrills when it dismantles the central myth of the corporate biopic, reminding moviegoers that stagnation and exploitation are the only fruit of individual effort. True creativity and innovation come only from the community.