Ex-MTV stalwart David Fincher (Zodiac, Se7en) goes back to his frat boy roots with this spiffily-edited, entertaining yet thoughtful buddy drama about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Unless you’ve been living under a rock reading first edition books and disconnected from the rest of the (real) world, you’ve most probably heard of Facebook—the biggest social networking site in the world with over 500 million members (“Facebook me” is our common buzz phase too)—and its impact on the way the modern world communicates. With the help of veteran screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (TV’s The West Wing) who adapted source material The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, Fincher has elevated a potentially predictable party story into an absorbing character drama, thanks to Sorkin’s smart, trigger-happy dialogue which leaves no one unscathed in its portrayal of morality and the perils of money.Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg to the hilt with his awkward yet confident posturing (the real Zuckerberg is also the epitome of “nerd cool”); the online guru and subsequent Harvard dropout who chanced upon the idea that would make him a billionaire after a disastrous date. He creates Hot or Not, an online site which lets users click who they think is more attractive. The site was in fact so hot, it even crashed Harvard University’s internal computer systems following a massive jam (20,000 visitors in just over an hour), and the rest, as they say, is online history. The following narrative is framed around two depositions which flash back and forth: One which which shows Zuckerberg at loggerheads with twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by a brilliant Armie Hammer), who first came up with the idea for Facebook; and another one with his one-time best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) over the origins and ownership of the site (Saverin provided the start-up money).Director David Fincher effortlessly melds The Social Network into an engrossing study of the power of corruption, flipping Zuckerberg from socially-maladjusted college student into a young man governed by obsession, greed and entitlement; but with a heart. Tender, quiet moments, when we see Zuckerberg walking back to his dorm alone at the start of the film and at the film’s coda, where see we Zuckerberg still pining for the his disastrous date who started it all, simply show that Zuckerberg has everything, yet nothing, at the end of the journey. It’s the smaller details like these which elevate The Social Network into an acquired masterpiece, just like its founder.