BlackBerry

It’s a culture clash business comic-drama where the geeks and the suits go on a rollercoaster ride, a story stripped of outside life but rife with telling touches.

Investing heartily in its story's personalities, and eschewing myth-making reverence or preciousness, BlackBerry's makers entertainingly frame their film as a workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging.

Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

Johnson is also ruthless in his depiction of the business reality behind the glossy surface waffle of the tech dream.

Yet despite the guffaws, the film (directed by Matt Johnson) is deeper than a mere morality play about villainous money men.

It’s a film, ultimately, about failure. And immediately that makes it a far more intriguing proposition than all the boardroom backslapping of a movie such as Air.

Giving the turbulent tale of one of America’s first smartphone’s rise and fall an appropriately rollicking biopic, Matt Johnson transforms what could’ve been a dry visual representation of a Wikipedia article into a mini tech epic.

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.

Every time Howerton enters a scene, he exudes a pure, visceral intensity in a way that is terrifying, hilarious, and consistently captivating.

Howerton almost rescues this uneven, chaotic film in a performance that will make you wonder where this has been his entire career, but this is the BlackBerry of techy biopics. It’s nothing new anymore.