A semi-scenic, mostly horizontal non-metropolis located about 100 kilometres west-southwest of Toronto, the city of Waterloo (pop. 121,000) has earned a reputation as the Silicon Valley of the North—a close-knit network of tech companies and think tanks encircled by university campuses and a disproportionate number of insurance firms. The latter pile-up is a peculiarity that has led to the city also being dubbed (a bit less sexily) “The Hartford of Canada,” a reference that might have made Matt Johnson’s mid-’90s civic time capsule/corporate origin myth BlackBerry even funnier than it already is. It’s hard, though, to imagine anybody (including the lyricists of ABBA) improving on the script’s best line, which gets shouted proudly by local antihero Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) at a moment of truth in the NHL head offices: “I’m from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!”
With his gleaming bald pate and dead-eyed stare, Howerton’s incarnation of the infamous Ontario businessman Balsillie—who became a household name around here through his very public and ultimately failed attempts to shanghai a hockey franchise to the steel town of Hamilton—does indeed look a bit like a boardroom Nosferatu. Elsewhere, this sleek, toothy predator is referred to as a “shark,” which makes him all the better equipped to maul the “pirates” poised to shake down the shallow end of the late-’90s internet start-up pool. Balsillie doesn’t like the geeky non-entities pitching him on a combination cell phone/handheld computer, but he hates the idea that somebody else might get rich off their scheme.
Howerton’s 40-proof, rageaholic performance skirts caricature but comes out the other end as a psychologically deft tour de force. This loosely fictionalized version of Balsillie, whose seething, pent-up contempt for partners and competitors alike emanates from some darker place (maybe even subconscious solidarity with his geeky new underlings) is a memorable and malevolent creation—the closest thing Canadian entertainment has had to a Gordon Gekko since the glory days of Traders. Inevitably, Michael Douglas’ Reaganite bloodsucker gets invoked in BlackBerry by a character played (just as inevitably, and beneath a Karate Kid–ish headband) by co-writer/director Johnson, who slyly exploits the current non-visibility of BlackBerry Limited co-founder Douglas Fregin to insert a barely veiled version of him at the company’s primal scene. Johnson’s Doug is a pop-cultural sponge whose vision for BlackBerry mostly involves eating pizza and watching Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or They Live (1988) with the boys; suffice it to say that Balsillie, who is, existentially speaking, all out of bubblegum, is not amused.
Rather than presenting a tonal problem, the wild contrast in acting styles between the technically adroit veteran Howerton and Johnson—who’s been riffing on this same hipster-doofus persona for almost 20 years, since his YouTube start-up is evocative of the deeper, generational tensions of the story being told, as is the fact that Doug’s colleagues are played by various semi-luminaries of the Toronto film scene. In its tale of self-styled keyboard warriors crashing the gates of industry—a narrative freely adapted— unavoidably echoes (2010), still the gold standard for millennial docudrama, in spite of its ultimately shortsighted Sorkinisms about the Real Meaning of Facebook.
