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The criterion for judging a film like The Social Network is to determine whether or not its story would be worth telling even if it wasn’t inspired by truth. Would it be just as fascinating, dramatic and entertaining if it only sprung from the mind of a screenwriter and wasn’t based on a worldwide Internet phenomenon? Yes, I believe it would, and that says something about how well made it is.

Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to watch a film like this as only entertainment and not as a docudrama on the creation of Facebook, the online social network now worth $25 billion. The fact that Facebook really exists makes the film all the more intriguing, but the good thing is it doesn’t rely on viewers’ knowledge of this to be engaging. Truth or no truth, The Social Network works as a film with rich, intelligent dialogue, complex characters and a dynamic rhythm. It also tells a thoughtful, absorbing story, which is what we want it do before it does anything else.

It all begins in the fall of 2003, when a smug, introverted college student named Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) gets dumped by his girlfriend. Mark is a computer science major at Harvard who writes code like everyone else breathes air. He returns to his dorm and blogs derogatory comments about his ex before creating a website poll where visitors are asked to rate girls from surrounding schools based on their hotness. The 22,000 hits the site receives causes the Harvard network to crash and Mark is reprimanded by the college board, although he argues he deserves recognition for illustrating how vulnerable their system is. In a way, he has a point.

Word gets out about Mark’s computer wizardry and he’s soon recruited by twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) to work on an independent project. They ask him to help build and design an online social networking site called Harvard Connection. Mark says he’s in but weeks go by and they never hear from him, despite leaving him countless e-mails and phone messages. That’s because Mark and his best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) are too busy building their own social networking site. Did Mark just steal the other students’ idea?

The film jumps around to different points in time, cross-cutting between Mark and Eduardo developing the site called The Facebook and to two different trials: one where Mark is being sued by the Winklevoss twins and Narendra; and another where he’s being sued by Eduardo himself. Each party basically claims the same thing: Mark is a thief and a traitor. Over the course of the film, it’s hard to disagree with them.

Aaron Sorkin’s snappy screenplay and Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall’s editing are masterful in the way they reveal so much information to us without a whole bunch of tedious explanation. The film is lean and moves fast, but it’s perfectly comprehensible, and we become immersed in its fast-paced world. I walked away feeling like I knew everything I needed to in a limited amount of time, which sort of mirrors Mark’s gift for programming a complex website in a week when it would have take an entire company years, at least according to Mark.

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