It’s a drama built around the battle over the money of Facebook as Zuckerberg’s college buddy and original partner Eduardo Saverin (played with good-natured loyalty by Andrew Garfield) and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer with moneyed entitlement) sue Zuckerberg for what they claim is a rightful share in the company, with the story playing out in flashback.

You can get caught up in the “truth” of the details, the portrayals of characters and friendships and personalities, the accusations of theft and betrayal, but The Social Network is not a documentary or a biopic. This story of the creation of Facebook is not really about Facebook but the people who created it and how relationships unraveled on its trajectory to becoming a national (and eventually global) phenomenon and multi-million (now multi-billion) dollar business. The irony inherent in the film is that this young, arrogant genius with no people skills managed to deconstruct and reconstruct the social experience as a web-based simulacrum, and that this seriously uncool outcast designed an online community the thrived because it was cool. The Social Network (2010) presents Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) as a self-involved nerd genius in Harvard who wants social acceptance but hasn’t a clue as to how to social interaction really works, either on a date or with his friends.

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