Compelling to a point but runs out of steam after a while

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 2011)

Once upon a time a bright but apparently very socially inept young man named Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) became the youngest billionaire in the world pretty much by accident when he created Facebook, now the most popular & widely used social networking site available - and royally angered and/or back-stabbed a few people along the way. Among them were the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer with a body double), who hired him to help design a social network site for their school, his best friend Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield) and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster whose personal & professional career was a series of spectacular highs and lows.
Like any film based on a true story you have to wonder just how much of the dramatization on screen is true and how much of it is just that - drama. It's a compelling film to a point, but after a while I grew tired of the film's "brilliant irony" that the founder of Facebook is - or may be - a hopelessly anti-social person, cruel and condescending to those who sees as intellectually inferior but unable to truly connect with anyone emotionally, and that will also depend on how well you can tolerate Jesse Eisenberg, one of many actors who probably won't transition well to leading man roles once it's clear he's too old for the 'more than a boy but not quite a man' niche, as the film's anti-heroic interpretation of Mark Zuckerberg. By the end of the film I found myself rooting for the Winklevoss twins to "gut the little nerd", as they put it, even though they weren't that much better than Mark.
As a trivia note, Zuckerberg actually had a steady girlfriend during the rise of Facebook so that alone may cause to question how accurate the film's depiction of him really is.