But any controversy about the on-screen action is uncalled for, as references to coke-sniffing, bong-hitting and half-naked interns dancing are kept at a PG-13 level. The buzz on The Social Network is that the Facebook movie is pretty racy. And it gets them just as many girls - “We have groupies!” one of them gushes excitedly after a tryst in a restaurant bathroom. Their peers treat them like rock stars, except instead of writing killer guitar riffs, they’ve written a MySpace killer. Photos: Merrick Morton/Columbia PicturesStartup culture gets romanticized, but why not? The Facebook guys live in a playground world filled with fancy VC dinners and late-night parties. Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) hangs with Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) in The Social Network.

Once the website begins to take off, the excitement of building a web app is transferred to the excitement of launching a company. The coding stuff is mostly in the first act. While the 1983 thriller dared to show Matthew Broderick’s coupler modem, The Social Network dares to show a LiveJournal text field marked up with raw HTML. It’s certainly the most accurate depiction of computers in a blockbuster film since War Games.

So The Social Network comes as a refreshing change. For every minor triumph like Sneakers or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, there’s a totally unrealistic farce like Hackers, Swordfish or the entire CSI television franchise.

Hollywood’s depiction of computers and people with an intimate understanding of them in popular culture has been especially lacking in both truth and believability since the birth of the microprocessor. Mostly, it’s rare to find a film even discussing code, never mind actually showing it on screen. Cyberpunk poster boy Trent Reznor scored the film with Nine Inch Nails collaborator Atticus Ross, giving it a dark, edgy, Radiohead-esque vibe. At one point in the movie, a Perl script is mentioned (undoubtedly a first for Hollywood) and it was punctuated by a loud, “Yeah, Perl!” from the back of the auditorium.Ī scene of a regatta race was shot with tilt-shift effects, which drew knowing howls of delight from the Flickrati in attendance. The screening I attended in San Francisco was packed with coders, techies and bloggers - a GigaOM T-shirt in my row, two women in front of me dressed in Eventbrite red, the ubiquitous Laughing Squid shirt. Max Minghella, left, and Armie Hammer portray ConnectU founders Divya Narendra and Cameron Winklevoss.

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