GRADE: A+

Directed by: David Fincher

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella

Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language.

Running Time: 121 minutes

In 2007, writer Aaron Sorkin’s “The Farnsworth Invention” opened on Broadway. The play was a classic 20th century American tale of ambition, innovation and fortitude centered on arguably the most influential invention of the 20th century, television. Based on the book “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich, Sorkin appropriates the 21st century’s most indelible technological medium to tell a similar myth in “The Social Network.” Clearly Sorkin is drawn to morality tales of pioneers and the all-too-often dark underbelly of their searing creativity. The result is incontrovertibly one of the finest films to make its way to a theater this year, a work that uses a springboard many see as nothing more than a time wasting distraction to tell a titanic story of American hubris and alienation.

“The Social Network” begins shortly after the turn of the millennium, a fitting milestone if ever there was one. Harvard sophomore and computer programming wizard Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is obsessed with how to distinguish himself at an institution peopled with geniuses. Fixated with becoming popular, but too much of a socially inept sociopath to ever be included among Harvard’s exclusive associations, Mark partners with his only friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), and designs his own club, peopling it with his “friends”—now 500 million strong and counting. He calls it Facebook.

Aaron Sorkin’s (“A Few Good Men,” “The West Wing,”) script—lightening fast and unfathomably dense—is like a perpetual motion machine, an unstoppable, unending force of linguistic and structural brilliance. Sorkin uses legal depositions to move the plot along, a sort of book-ending, flashback-inducing narrative device well known to fans of his work. From the very beginning, Mark’s rise to the top was marred by scandal, and Sorkin uses not one but two such legal encounters to reveal that Mark’s idea for Facebook, like so much in the information age, may not have been entirely his own.

Do not make the mistake of assuming this movie has anything to actually do with Facebook. Facebook is merely the vehicle to which Sorkin and director David Fincher hitch their narrative wagon. In this way, “The Social Network” has much more in common with “There Will Be Blood” except that, while that film examined the rise of the American business tycoon in a bygone era, this one intentionally sets out to show you the genesis of a modern Rockefeller, Carnegie or Vanderbilt. In the 21st century, information is the new oil, the new steel. What hasn’t changed is the mentality of the tycoon. Single minded and driven to succeed at all costs, we watch in revulsion as Mark betrays the one real friend he has in the world to maintain his tenuous hold on the illusion of relationship.

“All creation myths need a devil,” we are told, except that in this case, the creator is the devil. Mark is charmless, a thoroughly unlikable, irredeemable character. He uses the web to both destroy and to create. Spurned by women, he rationalizes that it is because his intellect gets in the way. After all, he is the smartest guy in the room and never wastes an opportunity to make sure everyone knows it. But we, like his exes, know the truth—Mark is a raging jerk, a pompous, monstrously self-absorbed tool. Too bad these are the sorts of people who tend to change the world and make history. Eisenberg plays the part with perfect, deceptively simple, understated pitch. He is supported by a deliriously good cast, particularly Brit Andrew Garfield (if Mark is the head, Eduardo is the heart, the conscience of the film) and Justin Timberlake as Napster co-creator Sean Parker, who appears at a crucial moment to shepherd the newborn company toward profitability and, simultaneously, line his own pockets.

If you think you’re not interested in the details of Facebook’s inception, much less the algorithms, statistical modeling and computations necessary to get it airborne, you will be. Despite several passages of impenetrable technobabble, the film moves on the nimble feet of a thriller. Director Fincher (“Seven,” “Fight Club,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) demonstrates nothing short of holistic control over every conceivable element of the production, from his crimson filters (go ten thousand men of Harvard—fight, fight, fight!) to his use of “Nine Inch Nails’” Trent Reznor for the darkly ambient score. Fincher’s influence is so assured that one might be tempted to think the film lacks his usual technological bravado. But even in a film that doesn’t appear to demand technical prowess or computer-generated magic, Fincher finds a way to dazzle, often without the audience even being aware of it. Among Mark’s enemies are twin brothers. What do you do if you need twins who can both act and look as if they are chiseled from the pages of a superhero comic? You hire Armie Hammer and, with the magic of digital imagery and a new hairdo, put him in the same scene twice. Fincher, who is known for justifiably attention getting moments, shows off only once at a rowing event in which he employs selective focus and tilt shift photography to transform a posh regatta sporting event on the Thames appear into a weird and wonder miniature diorama.

The social networking website Facebook has fundamentally altered the manner in which we communicate. Relationships, for better or worse, have been reduced to so much binary code. And while “The Social Network” certainly has plenty to say on the matter, that’s like saying the point of “Citizen Kane” was a commentary on the newspaper industry. “The Social Network” is about so much more. Stimulating, illuminating, thrilling and deeply engrossing, “The Social Network” is about nothing less than the creation and recreation of America itself.

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