Nerds in film: Why the pasty-faced, spectacle-wearing, socially awkward types are having the last laugh

As the new film ‘BlackBerry’, about the group of Canadian misfits who designed the BlackBerry phone, premiers at the Berlin International Film Festival this week, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at the wave of 1980s nerd movies and asks, is the genre making a comeback?

Matt Johnson’s new film ‘BlackBerry’ is reviving the Eighties nerd genre (Budgie Films Inc)

It’s hardly news that the nerds have long since had their revenge, both in movies and in real life. In 1980s cinema, they may have been the butt of the joke, but the pasty-faced, spectacle-wearing, socially awkward types ridiculed then have become the tech billionaires and Silicon Valley savants who control the way we live now.

In the new comedy-drama BlackBerry, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival a few days ago, the nerds are back on screen. The film tells the jaw-dropping true story of how desperate and ruthless businessman Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) wrangled a group of Canadian misfits working for a no-hope company called Research In Motion (RIM) into designing an interactive mobile phone that could send emails.

Before Balsillie came along, the all-male group of RIM employees would spend most of their time in the office watching Raiders of the Lost Ark videos or playing computer games. With their hard-driving boss goading them, their device, with its sleek design and thumb-operated keyboard, achieved a 45 per cent share of the global mobile phone market. They became kings of the world... before the company collapsed in 2013. Today, BlackBerry survives as a cybersecurity software outfit. Its share of the mobile phone market is roughly 0 per cent.