I’ve never understood why men as intelligent and capable as Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg subscribe so strongly as they do to the culture of being a dick. I get that it’s a shortcut to being cool, a shortcut to being funny, that it can make you appear to be strong just as much as it reveals that you’re weak. If you can follow complex systems of logic and perceive the way original ideas can ripple through society the way Zuckerberg does, and did in creating Facebook, then surely he must have been able to see that being “a dick” delivers a small short-term gain with real, long-term negative consequences. It doesn’t actually make you cool, or witty, or strong. Instead it forever brands you as a jerk and that’s the kind of behaviour people will remember for all the wrong reasons.

That Zuckerberg continues to be dogged today by his snide remarks and callous behaviour towards others during his time at Harvard is one of the themes discussed in David Fincher’s “The Social Network”, a fictional account of Facebook’s creation. Here we have the brilliant mind behind the network joined by more than 650 million friends and, according to the movie, he has a hard time holding onto just one. It is sympathetic to him, often showing him as being sensitive when it counts, but it doesn’t pull any punches in showing how often he’s in the wrong and how sad his state remains in that area today.

The story told on the screen begins with a conversation between Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) and it doesn’t go well. Exhausted by his drive to be accepted by the university’s exclusive final clubs, she dumps him. Mark decides to exercise his pain of rejection by writing a public blog post that surgically insults every aspect of the poor girl and then creates Facemash.com, a website that allows his peers to rate the university’s women based on their looks, debasing the entire campus female population in one swoop.

That the rejection was the impetus for Facebook is perhaps too pat an idea. Mark had already created several experimental social applications earlier in his life and when your mind becomes hooked on the potential for something great, it follows it regardless of what else is going on. For the purpose of story it’s where the movie goes and that creates a nice structure for a beginning and an end and leads to other embellishments too.

No, Napster founder Sean Jones doesn’t look like Justin Timberlake, nor do hacking competitions attract raucous groups of cheering, sexy women, and Silicon Valley doesn’t speak in the ratt-a-tatt, witty conversational style of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. All these flourishes do accurately communicate the palpable sense of excitement and adventure going on within the heads of those involved. It may have been boring for others to watch unfold at the time, but if they knew what we know now, it could have seemed like the adventure of a lifetime.

This is the real success of The Social Network. It takes what should be very dry material and makes it tensely entertaining from start to finish, regardless of what you may know about computers. It gives us people with little personality and makes them utterly captivating to watch. As Mark Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg captures the facial disconnect of someone living within their mind, but fuels it with subtle touches of nervous and excited energy that convey all the emotion needed.

The plot centres mainly on the dispute over who came up with the idea of Facebook, drawing heavily from court transcripts and a book written about the subsequent lawsuits between Zuckerberg and his early collaborators. Through court exchanges and remembrances we see the drama unfold between fellow Harvard students the Winklevoss twins and Mark. Both are inspired by MySpace and Friendster to create their own social networks, but with a focus on schools. The Winklevoss twins have wealth, influence, and belong to the clubs Zuckerberg covets, but can’t program and so hire Mark to build their website. They want to leverage the prestige and exclusivity of Harvard’s academic clubs, but Mark more perceptively understands that it’s the impulse to check up on the people you know that is the key and so secretly creates his own model in private.

Whether Mark stole the project from the Winklevoss twins becomes a question less important than if Zuckerberg was manipulative or deceitful in using those around him to get Facebook up and going. He had the talent and drive to start the idea, but needed others to provide the funding and industry influence. The movie captures perfectly the feeling of riding a change in the market, of having being surrounded by people who don’t understand, who feel insecure about the unknown, and the adventure of it all as the stakes go up and up when the change takes effect and the momentum of it all takes control. How easy it is at that point to feel the need to cut others loose out of a sense of survival and not realize it might be an absence of leadership.

I won’t dare spoil the final note of the film, but from everyone I spoken to who has seen the movie it’s the biggest moment in the movie and one everyone will have an opinion about. Is it the perfect ending? Will people leave the movie wondering about Zuckerberg the man and what he’s lost or gained? Or will it inspire questions about Facebook itself, a network built upon a keen insight into the baser instincts of people, but one so powerful now, how can it possibly live up to its responsibilities and can anyone at the top appreciate the value of the human resources tied up within it?