In 1989 the world watched transfixed as the blocks came tumbling down. In Berlin it was to the sound of sledgehammers and cheers, but in Japan, the US and soon the world over, the only noise was the tap-tapping of Game Boy buttons as Tetris mania took hold. At the time no one would have drawn a connection between the two, the only traces of the puzzle game’s Soviet origins being Kremlinesque onion domes on the intro screen and a Russian folk ditty remixed as 8-bit muzak. Now Tetris’s improbably Le Carré-ish back-story is told in Apple’s effervescent and mostly entertaining film of the same name.

Player 1 is Henk Rogers, the first name Dutch, the rest an all-American bundle of optimism given abundant life by Taron Egerton. We find him happily familied in Tokyo but sinking into debt when he happens upon the instantly addictive puzzler, born in the USSR but scooped up by Mirrorsoft, computer publishing arm of the many-tentacled Robert Maxwell. Rogers’s bank manager brightens at the prospect of business with the billionaire even while British audiences wincingly anticipate the arrival of shredders and the disappearance of pension funds.

But for now Rogers is buoyant as he lands in Moscow, meets Tetris’s grey-faced creator and attempts to penetrate state-run software house Elorg armed with little more than a pair of Levi’s and a smile. But, as one programmer puts it: “Never underestimate the power of Basic.” If Rogers is straightforward, he learns that Moscow is a switchback labyrinth, his problems soon piling up like mismatched jigsaw pieces — his livelihood, home and even family coming under threat.

Director Jon S Baird paints Soviet-era Moscow with a broad brush: everyone is either a downtrodden prole, dead-eyed apparatchik or west-facing rebel bopping to “The Final Countdown”. The broadest brush of all is reserved for Maxwell, a real-life pantomime villain rendered here in so much padding and face pudding that he is near expressionless and immobile. (Roger Allam, allegedly, is acting in there somewhere.) Like the press baron, the movie is bloated in the middle, getting bogged down in small-print quibbling over computer, console, arcade and, crucially, handheld rights.

But, like the game itself, the energetic Tetris is hard to resist. In the spirit of 1980s Americana, a high-five ending is assured and eventually everything slots neatly into place. If only the same could be said of the old Soviet bloc.

★★★☆☆

On Apple TV Plus from March 31