GET THE MESSAGE

"BlackBerry" and "Chile '76."

- ANTHONY LANE

If you enjoyed Ben Affleck’s “Air,” currently in theatres, but felt that it was too puffed up, here comes a lesson in deflation. Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” is a reminder that, in dramatic terms, rise and fall is almost always more gripping, and more morally provoking, than rise and rise. For those who were offplanet, or awaiting conception, at the dawn of the millennium, the title may need some explanation. A BlackBerry was a portable communication device, equipped with buttons so itty-bitty that they could not be comfortably deployed by anybody larger than Rumpelstiltskin. Nonetheless, for a while, owning a BlackBerry was all the rage. It could slot into a holster on your belt, allowing you to draw it like a Colt and fire off a lethal message to that guy with the goatee in Accounts.

Johnson shows us how the rage began. Not content with directing the new film, and writing it with Matthew Miller, he also stars as Doug Fregin, one of the creators of the BlackBerry, and, if the movie is to be believed, the most committed wearer of a headband since John McEnroe. (Summoned to a business meeting, Doug keeps his headband on even while clad in a suit.) Doug and his thirtysomething pal Mike Lazaridis ( Jay Baruchel)—whose hair is gray from the outset, as if sapped of color by the power of the adjacent brain—are the co-founders of a small Canadian outfit called Research in Motion. Has corporate nomenclature ever been more dazzlingly dull?