Because consumer technology commands such a central place in most of our lives, movies about the people behind products and services made by Apple, Google, etc are always going to be popular, especially if they contain the elements the contain great drama like scrappy inventors, huge amounts of money and the David vs Goliath parables we see everywhere in American cinema from Rocky and Star Wars on down.

The formation and global ascendancy of the Blackberry very much fits that bill, but director and co-writer Matt Johnson, who also stars as the company’s co-founder Doug, makes it his own, giving the proceedings a verité, documentary-like feel that makes the story even more engaging and adheres to the themes of seat-of-the-pants invention in the movie.

Research in Motion comprises a handful of nerds in an upstairs office space in a cruddy strip mall in Ontario, routinely stopping work on handheld electronic devices to watch movies and play video games. While Doug runs the company like a frat house, Mike (Jay Baruchel) sits quietly in the back room tinkering with the device that will one day conquer the world.

At the same time we meet Jim (Glenn Howerton) an ambitious and acerbic executive who finds he’s over-reached and gone against the wishes of his boss (Martin Donovan) in a presentation to a client he hopes will write his ticket. We’ve already seen him meet Doug and Mike, who are more like Laurel and Hardy than business people as they pitch their handheld device to him in a meeting he barely listens to, stewing over his own career doldrums.

But despite his initial disinterest, something convinces Jim the two socially awkward nerds who shuffled into his office and shuffled ignominiously out of it minutes later are onto something, so he fronts up to their office with what looks like an unmissable but Faustian bargain – he’ll invest, run the place like a real business and make them all rich in return for a slice of the company.

Doug wants none of it, but when the lovable losers find the deal they were counting on from a US tech firm is a dud and they’re out of money, they have little choice.

Jim works the phones and jets from one high profile meeting to another, cracking the whip to make RIM work properly and for Mike to come up with the device that would become the Blackberry, predicated completely on being able to receive emails on a handheld device (it’s funny to remember how revolutionary that once was watching it now, 20 years after the fact).

As the Blackberry explodes and becomes shorthand for a culture as well as just a product, the corporate intrigue and pressure start to mount, and the fallout (as history proved) will be wrought by several crises – the market forces pressure to cut corners that Mike, despite his insistence on making something good, is powerless to withstand, one that ultimately cuts him off from everyone he cares about, and the arrival of the iPhone, which killed any and all competition.

The most interesting character is Jim Balsillie. On the surface he’s obviously the villain – just like in real life, it transpired that he’d broken the law by backdating stock options to entice new hires. And the real Balsillie has said he wasn’t nearly as aggressive and manipulative as the movie portrays him. But (to the extent the real history matches what’s shown), he did create a company worth US$80bn out of a room full of slackers, and he used smarts, a taste for risk and sheer balls to do it.

As such, the movie also tells a story unique to the culture of big business in the post-internet age, firstly about how you can create something great and how it can become a monster that consumes your principles and destroys everything around you – Doug and Mike are in no way prepared for the onslaught of cutthroat managers and boards assigned to their company, the backstabbing, the ousting from the thing they created, etc – and secondly about how engineers and inventors never usually change the world, it’s marketers and managers who use corporate cut and thrust to do so.

The story is thrilling, the script contains just enough technospeak for mass audiences, the performances are uniformly great and the direction has a style all its own.