Based On A True(ish) Story
We've recently gotten a deluge of company biopics. Why?
A man—it’s almost always a man—has an idea. He has to execute on this idea, and ultimately, he brings a rag-tag group together to do something extraordinary and beat the odds and/or intimidating external forces.
This description is about Blackberry or Air or Tetris or Flamin' Hot (coming soon to a theater near you); it’s also about a wave of movies on the way. Labeled a “semi-cynical trend” by the Los Angeles Times, these films make sense as a brand exercise of sorts: keep your company’s name in the public consciousness, link it with popular actors and create a certain line of thinking surrounding whatever it is you make.
It’s no surprise that the best version of this type of movie is Blackberry, centered on a failure of a company as opposed to a successful corporate behemoth like Nike. There’s something more truthful and relatable in the disappointments. History’s always written by the winners, but when a company like Nike’s Jordan Brand gets center-billing, it just feels like bragging and any semblance of momentum always comes with an “I know where this is going” feeling.
Blackberry, on the other hand, is a movie about a bunch of (eventual) losers. Sorry for the spoilers of the early 21st-century tech market, but odds are that you’re reading this on an iPhone, so that probably gave Blackberry’s future away.
Centering on a nebbishy intellectual played by Jay Baruchel and a corporate shnook but persuasive asshole portrayed by Glenn Howerton, Blackberry has a real idea behind it, unlike its brand brethren. There’s a tremendous revulsion to capitalism behind the sheen of innovation and creation. It’s also funny as hell, something its competitors try out but never fully accomplish.
You should see Blackberry despite what I’m about to say about this flood of biopics. Hey. Everything’s confusing. It is what it is.
What this type of movie feels like is the next iteration of the musical biopic. The musical biopic isn’t anything new as we’ve already had parodies of the genre like 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story to 2016’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, but Bohemian Rhapsody’s bonkers theatrical showing along with its (frankly ridiculous) Oscar haul of four trophies showed that there’s a hankering for streamlined stories centering on things that people already love.
The neutered version of Freddie Mercury’s story didn’t do much other than sell some more Queen albums and tell a bunch of blatant lies. It’s lazy, relatively cheap, reductive and plays like gangbusters.
When Ben Affleck and Matt Damon started their new company, Artists Equity, their first production was Air, a down-the-middle, four-quadrant, perfectly fine corporate drama focusing on a product that is ubiquitous in popular culture. Even if you don’t wear Jordans, you at least know what they are. And the name Michael Jordan immediately rings a bell, no matter who you are.
Part of the company’s new mission is to give prominent crew and cast members a piece of profits, which is certainly a positive in the grand scheme of things. And so the story of Michael Jordan and his family getting a cut of the Jordan shoe line is a neat, little parallel story for Affleck to choose as the inaugural Artists Equity project. There’s also something a bit more craven to center a story on a bunch of people selling something utilizing a type of story we know well. Affleck choosing to make the ultimate brand-ambassadorship film shows exactly what plays in Hollywood right now and what Affleck thought Amazon would want.
There’s also the question of why now? Why are all of these filmmakers using the 1980s and ‘90s as a backdrop for their visionary stories? Matt Johnson, director of Blackberry, had some thoughts on this very idea while on The Big Picture. He went on to state that it’s a reflection of the times we’re going through.
It’s almost as if we’re hankering for the past, a more creative time when things were open despite the technological limitations. It was a wild, wild west of sorts. The shrinking of everything into a few monopolies has made it so that a jump like Nike’s from mid-sized company to world superpower is rarer and rarer. There are a few at the top and then everyone else trying to survive in the middle. There’s a bit of the good ol’ days when looking back at the more up-in-the-air late 20th century.
The concept of “selling out” used to be a bigger deal. Defector wrote about this earlier this year around the recent crop of generic Super Bowl commercials, but there seems to be a prevalence of the “get your money” line of thinking, which I agree with despite its repercussions.
Building a film around a company signing someone is icky at its core. There’s very little true impetus and it almost always ends with a bunch of middle-aged white guys giving each other high-fives. The end scene of Blackberry is quite different. Everyone’s rich, but everyone is also morally bankrupt. They got what they wanted and then they wanted some more and it bit them in the ass.
Stories about losers are more interesting than stories about winners. With that said, it’s time for a movie about the Zune.