Jay Baruchel, left, and Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry (IFC Films)

Retro technology makes for an engaging movie subject that folds together nostalgia, engineering, the vicissitudes of the business world, and the inevitable mix of alliances and adversaries. BlackBerry, an adaptation of Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, deliciously brings together the aforementioned elements to tell the humorous tale of the men behind the world’s first smartphone and its trajectory from breathtaking to cataclysmic.

Directed by Canadian filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson (playing the winning goofball techie Doug Fregin and sporting a red headband throughout), BlackBerry keeps the tone light and comic while charting the course of the Canadian company in a mid-budget, no-frills film that looks like a cult movie of yore and features bulky PCs, pay phones, and dial-up internet. It’s more Silicon Valley than The Social Network.

The fast-paced story begins in 1996 in the Canadian city of Waterloo, near Toronto, with Doug and his best friend Mike Lazaridis (a perfectly geeky Jay Baruchel), founders of the tech outfit Research in Motion (RIM), supplying modems to U.S. Robotics. They’re on the cusp of developing PocketLink, which will combine a phone, a pager, and email into a single device. The visionary pair know they’re onto something revolutionary, but need financial backing and industry savvy.

Doug is the soul of organization’s community, while Mike is its technical wizard who eventually surrenders to the role of co-CEO with arrogant and opportunistic Jim Balsillie (a bald-headed Glenn Howerton, from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), who is hired in a period of desperation. Impatient for success, Jim’s motto is, “Perfect is the enemy of good,” while perfectionist Mike believes, “Good enough is the enemy of humanity.”

Meanwhile, Doug maintains the fun clubhouse ambience of the company—where video games are played and movie posters are plastered everywhere—while quoting from The Breakfast Club or Wall Street and holding office movie nights. (Sometimes “emergency” movie nights are scheduled to boost morale.) Illustrating the scrappy nature of the organization is an episode where the team, without a requisite prototype of their planned mobile phone, is against the wall before a big presentation, and they fuse electronic games bought at a toy store into an ersatz gadget.

By 2003, with production in full swing, the BlackBerry has become the predominate mobile phone, the hallmark of business sophistication and a status symbol. Such an object of obsession, it’s dubbed “the crackberry.” Even Oprah touts the device on her talk show. And the once frolicking atmosphere becomes a cut-throat example of corporate culture.

Rival company Palm, known for their PalmPilot, is ready for a merger—to create a “PalmBerry”—and Jim keeps Palm’s CEO on the hook while making other plans, including personal ones related to his fixation with hockey and a whatever-it-takes mentality that includes shady dealings. His greed and aggressiveness clash against Mike’s meekness and artistry, in an exaggeration for dramatic effect.

Palm’s CEO Carl Yankowski, played by Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride), is among the entertaining supporting actors adding color to the proceedings, including Rich Sommer (Mad Men) as Paul Stannos, an engineer recruited from Google via a dicey deal, and the Canadian insider favorite, Michael Ironside (Scanners), as BlackBerry’s hollering COO, Charles Purdy.

However, the fix is in once Apple launches its dazzling iPhone in 2007. By comparison, RIM’s phone looks like a calculator, and it’s beloved clicking keypad is nothing compared to the iPhone’s slick functionality. BlackBerry’s 43 percent market share in 2010 drops to 0 percent within six years, while the iPhone rises to number one. (Nevertheless, some users like Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian were loyal well beyond its peak.) Adding insult to injury, the SEC uncovers stock fraud in the company, the result of early reckless decisions.

Despite the bad behavior by many of the eccentric characters involved, the film has us rooting for the bungling BlackBerry bunch, now underdogs whose fortunes go sideways. (After creating a world changing invention, surely they can’t be defrocked?) Underpinning the highs and lows of the mood is a soundtrack featuring Jay McCarrol’s electronic score that evokes old computers and tunes by the likes of Moby, Joy Division, and the White Stripes. “Waterloo Sunset,” by the Kinks, closes the film.

BlackBerry premiered in the main competition at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. IFC Films releases the film on May 12.