The filmmakers use clips of “Star Trek” and “Inspector Gadget” to show what they were doing was futuristic. The funniest bits of the movie are when the geeks are king, like NASA engineers on Apollo 9 gathering around a table figuring out data puzzles or soldering together hardware and writing code. It’s the Icarus story, except instead of wings they had autocomplete while typing with your thumbs. The second half of “BlackBerry” is heartbreaking - the loss of geek culture, the loss of principles and the loss of friendships. The film is adapted from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.” It is said to be “a fictionalization inspired by real people and real events.” Johnson also stars as Doug Fregin, a headband-wearing, movie-quoting uber-geek, an amalgam of a few Research in Motion people.

“BlackBerry” tells the standard rise and fall of a tech startup that blows up, naturally leading to insider infighting - think “Silicon Valley” and “The Social Network” - but there’s a twist here: The main money guy, while very shouty, is not the sleazy, bad guy you might expect.ĭirector and co-writer Matt Johnson recounts a breathless decade or so starting in 1996, when Research in Motion was just an office filled with tech geeks in Canada. The BlackBerry may seem quaint now in the days of sleek water resistant 5G phones with face ID, but it was the first mobile device with a pager, cellphone and email capability all in one thing.

The gripping and hugely enjoyable “BlackBerry” is about the famous - and later infamous - Research in Motion gadget that helped trigger the global smartphone era as we know it, before sliding into obsolescence. We’re here to learn about the Before Times, when the hottest tech device was nicknamed “CrackBerry.”

Mobile tech review