I didn't buy my first mobile phone until 2006 and still don't have a smartphone, and I'm fine with that, thanks; but this does mean that Matt Johnson's BlackBerry had to work especially hard to pique my interest. Well, a zingy trailer always helps, and when I actually sat down to watch the film there were two things which went a long way towards winning me over: archive footage of Arthur C Clarke from the 1960s, doing his thing as one of the architects and prophets of the modern world, and a credit sequence featuring footage from Blade Runner, Star Trek, 2001, and so on, all with an Elastica soundtrack. I know it's a personal, subjective thing, but I found myself very much in my comfort zone almost at once.

Most of the film happens in Waterloo, Canada. It opens in 1996 with brilliant engineers and terrible businessmen Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) about to pitch their new idea for a combined phone-email device to steely hard-headed executive Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). It turns out they're pitching to the wrong person, but the idea makes an impression on Balsillie and when one steely hard-headed business manoeuvre too many leaves him looking for a new job, he buys a third of Mike and Doug's company and installs himself as co-CEO to oversee the development of the new gadget.

There's a lot of scope for broad comedy here, with Howerton's cartoony, psychotically intense businessman finding himself surrounded by clueless nerds and geeks – all the buttons you'd expect are pushed here; the engineers spend all their time playing Doom, watching John Carpenter and Spielberg movies, arguing about Star Trek on the dial-up internet, and painting figures for Warhammer, while Mike's main reasons for dismissing Jim as a potential partner are that 'he's bald and he hasn't seen Star Wars'. It is all almost certainly too ridiculous to be strictly true, but it's very entertaining and buried away in here are seeds that will come to fruition later in the film.

This opening movement of the film concludes with a desperate scramble to produce a working prototype (supposedly overnight, if the film is to be believed) and the pitch of the resulting device to a major US telecoms company. There's a beautifully handled sequence here where Balsillie, whose faith in his new colleagues is already severely tested, is told by one of the telecoms people that the device they're proposing is effectively impossible to produce – whereupon Lazaridis, finally able to talk about pure engineering, dazzles the room with his ingenious solutions to the problems involved, to Balsillie's obvious amazement.

However, as you may have noticed, BlackBerry devices are not a prominent part of the pocket furniture of most people these days, and the film charts the company's apex and then the beginning of its decline as well. The film chooses to focus on a few episodes in particular in its history, using these to develop the key threads of the story: there's an attempted hostile takeover by PalmPilot, which occasions further screaming and dubious business practices from Balsillie in order to hire the world's best engineers to save the company, and then – perhaps inevitably – the moment arrives when the BlackBerry engineers gather around the big screen in their workshop and watch in bemusement as Steve Jobs announces a new kind of phone where the keyboard is part of the screen ('a toy' is Lazaridis' instant verdict, which history may not fully agree with).

The film never completely loses its sense of fun and the absurd – there's a sort of running joke about the hockey-obsessed Balsillie attempting to use his new-found wealth to buy an NHL team and transplant it to Canada – but the tone does grow more serious as the story proceeds. This, in a way, reflects the arc of the story – which is of how Lazaridis' company, Research In Motion, went from a scrappy and chaotic but generally amiable place to work to somewhere much more professional and corporate. This change is reflected in Baruchel's own performance, as well. There's obviously a sense in which BlackBerry is following the template established by The Social Network – tech phenomenon takes geeky creators by surprise and leads to friendships falling apart, as the price of success of success becomes clear. But, at the same time, the suggestion is that people never really change – there's a neat call-back at the end of the film, linking to the beginning and ensuring that there is a genuinely sense of closure and a story reaching a proper conclusion.

I do get a sense that this is a film made from a perspective viewing the success of BlackBerry as a specifically Canadian achievement – I believe it was part-funded by a Canadian TV network with a view to it being adapted into a TV mini-series at some not too distant future point. Prominent Canadian actors turn up, usually in cameos – Saul Rubinek appears as an American telecoms tycoon, while there's a slightly bigger role (in every sense) for the cult actor Michael Ironside, who appears as a hulking office enforcer Balsillie hires to whip the nerds into shape. A few familiar faces from elsewhere also appear (Martin Donovan, Cary Elwes), but the film really belongs to Howerton, Baruchel, and Johnson.

These are not finely nuanced turns, for the most part, but I don't think that's what this film really needs – the three main characters are essentially caricatures (Balsillie has said his depiction in this film is '95% made-up' but was still happy to participate in publicity for it), but they serve the story well. I knew virtually nothing about the history of mobile phones, let alone BlackBerry in particular, prior to seeing this film, but it is surprisingly educational as well as being oddly nostalgic as a reminder of that moment when owning a mobile phone became, for most people, one of those things you just did, rather than either a status symbol or the cause of mockery.

I did enjoy BlackBerry an enormous amount while I was watching it, as often happens when a film you have no expectations of proves to be smart and funny and informative. Probably it is a bit derivative of other films with similar subject matter, and – as ever – you probably should probably take most of what happens on screen with a pinch of salt. But this is still a very entertaining and satisfying film.

Awix

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