Richard Crouse

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when we were not tethered to our smart phones. A new film, “BlackBerry,” starring Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson, and now playing in theatres, vividly recreates the scrappy story of friendship, betrayal and hubris that began our obsession with our phones.

Baruchel and Johnson play Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, founders of small tech company Research in Motion. When we first meet them it’s 1996 and they are about to pitch a new kind of pager to hotheaded executive Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). He’s the kind of Art of War-style boss who snaps at an assistant who reaches for a bottle of water. “Thirst is a display of weakness.”

Too busy trying to backstab his way to the top of the corporate ladder to give the tech nerds his attention, he dismisses the awkward pitch before they even get to the end. But when his latest grab at a promotion gets him fired from his cushy corporate job, he reaches out to RIM with an offer.

Under his aggressive leadership, coupled with Lazaridis’s uncompromising search for perfection and Fregin’s clever engineering and heart, the Waterloo, Ontario storefront start-up soon debuts “the world’s largest pager.” Or is it “the world’s smallest email terminal?” Either way, it is a handheld game changer that combines a phone with the capabilities of a computer.

The odd little phone, with a QWERTY keyboard, encrypted messaging and low data cost, becomes a status symbol, used by some of the world’ most powerful people. In the hands of everyone from President Barack Obama and Justin Timberlake to Katy Perry and Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, the phones helped the world communicate in a whole new way.

The halcyon days of BlackBerry lasted a few years until shady business dealings, ambition and lack of vision relegated RIM’s products to the scrap heap; the “phone people had before they bought an iPhone.”

“BlackBerry” isn’t just a business story or the story of innovation. Instead, it is an underdog tale that emphasizes the human foibles that led to RIM’s downfall, not just the financial ones.

Baruchel and Howerton, as the characters who provide the story’s yin and yang, hand in strong performances.

Baruchel, topped with a shock of white hair, goes deep to play Lazaridis as a socially awkward man with a rich inner life, a perfectionist who can’t help himself from fixing a buzz on the office intercom in Balsillie’s office on the day of their big pitch.

As Balsillie, Howerton is all bluster, a thin-skinned man who covers his weaknesses with a thick veneer of bellicosity. From attempting to buy a hockey team after a rival slights the game to his wanton manipulation of RIM to suit his own ambitions, he is simultaneously the best and worst thing that ever happened to Lazaridis and Fregin.

As director and writer (as well as co-star), Johnson concentrates on the human side of the story, amping up the anxiety with a terrific sense of pacing and claustrophobic close-ups of his cast as their lives and business unwind.

“BlackBerry” is an interesting slice of recent history, made all the more interesting by the study of hubris that makes this tech story so human.