A $25 billion idea began with something to which almost everyone can relate: a sense of drunken aggrievement. One night in October of 2003, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, status-obsessed, socially maladjusted Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the university’s computers to create a site that featured a database of all the women on campus. An instant viral hit, the stunt crashed Harvard’s servers, but provided the underpinnings for Facebook, which today has over 400 million users.

All this is chronicled in director David Fincher’s wildly involving The Social Network, which deftly intercuts the story of this creation with depositions from two separate lawsuits that would spring up — one by a pair of blonde, preppy, upper-crust rowers, the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer, pulling double duty), who argue that Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) stole their idea, and one from Zuckerberg’s friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), eventually forced out of the company via the gamesmanship of interloper Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), Napster’s co-founder.

The accelerated trajectory of these characters — brilliant, brash and soon to be flush with cash — underscores the bullet train of progress represented by the collision of their imaginations with the immediacy of the Internet, where desire gets out ahead of reason, and sets moral compasses spinning. The natural inclination on the part of many filmmakers would be to ladle on artifice, in an effort to play up the movie’s zeitgeist quotient, but Fincher keeps the movie’s tech-y elements at the periphery, focusing instead on the time-honored dramatic elements of isolation, determination, avarice and betrayal.

Eschewing the sort of more naked play for emotionalism that marked his last work, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher instead — with great assistance from Aaron Sorkin’s bristling screenplay, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires — presents a consortium of tricky narrators, playing a delightful and engaging game of ping-pong with audience sympathies. The result is undeniably one of the year’s best films — an absorbing thriller for both Luddites and the plugged-in alike. (Sony/Columbia, PG-13, 120 minutes)