Recently, we’ve had films about Barbie dolls, Beanie toys and Nike Air Jordans. Now it’s the turn of the BlackBerry, the must-have early 2000s gizmo that brought emails to your pocket and ruined our work-life balance forever. ‘Believe it or not, I never touched one before we started making this movie,’ says writer-director Matt Johnson. ‘I never touched a BlackBerry.’

Well, now he has. The curly-haired Canadian (2013’s The Dirties) co-writes, directs and stars in BlackBerry, a visceral telling of an Icarus-like tale of two Toronto tech-savvy friends, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Douglas Fregin (Johnson). The founders of RIM (Research In Motion), they see their invention go global, with the help of bullish businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia fame), before crashing and burning.

Chronicled in Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book Losing The Signal: The Untold Story Behind The Extraordinary Rise And Spectacular Fall Of BlackBerry, even now, it’s staggering to think how far this once-ubiquitous device has fallen. ‘The international market, specifically the Far East, became obsessed with BlackBerry,’ says Johnson. ‘And BlackBerry became a huge, huge product outside of North America.’ And then? ‘All of a sudden . . . gone, completely gone.’ After holding over 50% of the global smartphone market, poor decision-making and the rise of the iPhone meant that by 2016, RIM’s market share was 0%.

As the film shows, Balsillie’s dislike of the goofy nerd Fregin, who loves nothing more than playing video games and screening movies with his peers, kickstarted the friction. ‘He's dealing with the court jester that he can't fire!’ says Johnson. Howerton agrees: ‘He was not sadistic. I don’t think he got off on humiliating people. But he also had no patience. He couldn’t suffer fools at all.’

Like the power dynamics between Facebook gurus Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, Johnson’s film becomes a case of the egos have landed. ‘In my opinion, there’s a true dignity to Jim Balsillie,’ the director says. ‘I don’ t disagree with anything he did personally or any of the things that he had to do to maintain the success that he tried to get, because I watched him and thought, “OK, Mike may not get him and Doug might really hate him. But Doug’s not realising that this guy is literally providing the structure by which they’re allowed to create his company.” And he’s doing it honestly.’ The real Balsillie was, by all accounts, a huge fan of Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, which appealed to Johnson immediately. ‘I’m always looking for film references in anything I do, because I love them,’ he says (Johnson also sneaks Raiders Of The Lost Ark into the movie: note the very final shot of a warehouse full of unsold BlackBerrys). ‘And I thought, “oh my god, this guy unironically loving Gordon Gekko is such a perfect place for Glenn to be thinking about this guy.” Because what’s so great about Gordon Gekko, even though he is a little bit of a caricature, is that he also has a sexiness about him.’

As he crafted one of the most enjoyable turns you’ll see this year, Howerton also took inspiration from another classic corporate shark: Alec Baldwin’s real-estate salesman from Glengarry Glen Ross, the movie of David Mamet’s play. ‘That movie and the performances in it, and Alec Baldwin’s in particular, was actually a pretty massive influence on how I wanted to portray the character,’ says Howerton. ‘The catchphrase we used for my character through the whole film was, “great, what’s next? What’s next?” He was never satisfied.’ Or as Johnson puts it, ‘he never stops to enjoy’. 

BlackBerry is in cinemas from Friday 6 October.