Everything you never wanted to know about the advent of Facebook, where “friends” gather on the Internet. An amorphous series of flashbacks from the depositions of two separate lawsuits takes you through the steps by which a socially inept (how ironic!) Harvard computer nerd stumbled upon “a once-in-a-generation holy-shit idea” and transformed himself into the world’s youngest billionaire, making more enemies than friends (how more ironic!) along the way. Of necessity, it is filled with references, jargon, proper names, which will be familiar to some and unfamiliar to others. The former will be in a better position not just to understand but to identify and to envy — and possibly, paradoxically, to feel superior. The others are apt to be left out in the cold or simply left cold. Regardless, the film engineers a remarkably smooth experience, even when pressing the accelerator to the floor. The compulsive rapid patter (Aaron Sorkin, logorrheic screenwriter) is well handled by all, but especially in the lead role by Jesse Eisenberg, the pretentious high-schooler of The Squid and the Whale grown now into a pretentious collegian, adding the essential ingredients of detachment, abstraction, and arrogance to complete the character’s charmlessness. The busy churning industrious background music sweeps you into the excitement whether or not you can see it or comprehend it. And director David Fincher bathes the eye with the muted dark harmonious color schemes of Whistler’s Nocturnes. Despite the pieciness of the narrative, the film gives a good impression of being all of a piece, all of a tone. Altogether, it glides, it slides, and it never really grips. With Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, John Getz, David Selby, Rashida Jones. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd