Blackberry review – souped-up account of the rise and fall of ‘Crackberry’

Innovators … Jay Baruchel, left, and Matt Johnson, centre, play the co-founders. Photograph: Courtesy of IFC Films/AP

Here is a punchy Canadian comedy-drama in that burgeoning true-life genre which could loosely be called Tech Startup Hubris; we’ve seen Dumb Money (about GameStop), WeCrashed (about WeWork), and The Beanie Bubble (about the bizarre 90s web-driven tulip-style craze for Beanie Babies). The great ancestor of them all is naturally David Fincher’s The Social Network, about Facebook, with its propulsive script by Aaron Sorkin. This film is a fictionally souped-up account of the steep rise and sudden fall of the BlackBerry, the handset device that towards the end of the 00s was so ubiquitous and addictive among the white-collar classes it was known as the “Crackberry”.

But then Steve Jobs unveiled his iPhone, and the BlackBerry executives suddenly looked like a bunch of brontosauruses that had been hit in the face by a meteor.