With billions in money and 500 million in friends (or friends of friends), The Social Network starts with an awkward table talk about China, its labour and a misguided, half-insecure break-up with a girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara). It ends with a guy sitting alone in the lawyer’s office, friendless, hitting the refresh button on his Facebook page. Would his former girlfriend accept his “add as friend” request?

That’s just one of the small, incisive blips of reality punctured throughout the blazing and witty vintage Hollywood screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, Charlie Wilson’s War). It will get a nod hopefully round Oscar time because Sorkin and David Fincher have created the next big-screen miracle: a talky thriller about 20-something computer programming geeks, relationship suicides, potential big money and litigation.

What’s also uniquely gifted to The Social Network is that it succeeds as a tent-pole without over-plowing the sex-and-drug angle (though it does play a part at the end of the film). The film is about the creation of Facebook and the subsequent legal battles within the co-founders. And it has the rhythm of box-office gold. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times puts it: “(the film is one in which) ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars.”

Often the film — drenched in Fincher’s colour-corrected palette of greenish-orange yellows which he used mostly for Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — drabs the film in the unconventional frame of teen films from the late-90s/early 2000s. It was a time when studios were making low-budget fare circling college campuses’ urban legends to pump up their revenue stream (give or take tawdry teen comedies).

However, this feeling of low-key lighting (and the inherited values of HD cinematography) adds a touch of subtle coldness to the film’s overall architecture, a trait shared by the principal character and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — played with picture-perfect detachment and angered, nerdy tones by Jesse Eisenberg. As a film about establishing the next big website that focuses on human interaction, seeing Eisenberg in stark emotional contrast is a flash of genius.

While Mark Zukerberg may have had the angered brain cells to launch Facebook in a spire of alcohol and let-downs (as an outburst of being dumped, he launches the site Hot or Not that hacks into pictures of female college students and pits them against each other, based on who gets how many votes), the film’s heart is a charming Andrew Garfield (playing Facebook co-founder/CFO Eduardo Saverin) kitted with semi-formal jackets and a low-esteem persona with chances of a Best Supporting Actor nod.

Complementing and negating Garfield’s classic Peter Parker persona (Garfield plays Peter in the upcoming Spider-Man reboot) is the film’s other Best Supporting Actor contender, Justin Timberlake. He slithers in as Sean Parker, the entrepreneur who launched the websites Napster and Plaxo.

Even as the film jumps between friendship, hostility and financial shake-ups, no one hits each other (they don’t even shove each other into a wall or something). They have lawyers for that!

Released by Columbia Pictures, The Social Network is rated PG-13 and is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It has moments of drug use and under-dressed women who are quickly taken care of by soaring egos, emotion detachment and legal depositions. This is the world of the power elite nerds — the minds without which we would be devoid of parasitic applications like Farmville.