If you’re unfamiliar with The Social Network, you’re horribly out of touch.

It’s the new movie about Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard undergraduate genius (now billionaire) who created Facebook, the titular network with 500 million members that revolutionized the way we use the Internet and connect with each other.

Don’t let yourself think this means that The Social Network is just a movie of the week that was made to cash in on the popularity of Facebook. In fact, the rushed production of the film only mirrors the immediacy that has become commonplace in our age, an immediacy that Facebook has reinforced ten-fold.

Directed by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club) and written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, A Few Good Men), The Social Network is a whip-smart, gorgeously shot talkie, where brilliant dialogue flies faster than bullets and the pace is quicker than that of an action film.

As Mark Zuckerberg, Jessie Eisenberg (Zombieland) sheds his usual awkwardly likable, poor man’s Michael Cera self and plays Zuckerberg as a cold, socially-inept, smart and ambitious young man more akin to Charles Foster Kane than a character from Freaks and Geeks. Zuckerberg is an asshole but he’s a brilliant one; he’s the hero by default because what he accomplishes so quickly and at such a young age is so impressive, you can’t help but be in awe.

Zuckerberg is an asshole but he is a brilliant one.

However, Eisenberg’s performance isn’t the only one of note. As co-founder and CEO of the growing Facebook, Andrew Garfield’s (Sony’s new Spider-Man) Eduardo Saverin is the emotional heart of the film.

He’s its most sympathetic character, but his belief in friendship and trust are detrimental to him. His belief in the traditional mode of friendship is the very reason he’s not fit to be a part of a company that redefined what a friend is.

Justin Timberlake is a scene-stealer as Napster founder, Sean Parker. Part party animal, part corporate networker, part genius entrepreneur, Parker as played by Timberlake is a charismatic wild card, driving Zuckerberg to push Facebook to its potential and replacing Saverin as the other driving force of the online revolution.

Rounding out the cast is Armie Hammer playing the twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss as entitled, yet not entirely unjustified, athletes suing Zuckerberg for stealing their idea.

The Social Network isn’t just a smart drama of ambition, though. While parts of it may play like a Shakespearean tragedy of friendship and betrayal, Sorkin’s script balances it with a healthy dose of college sex-comedy.

It’s a terrifically funny film, not in the same way that a Will Ferrell movie is, but more like a screwball comedy aimed at the modern, literate young person. It also taps into the modern ethos of the geek as hero. It’s fitting that in one scene Zuckerberg and Saverin attend a Bill Gates lecture because The Social Network is another example of the geek inheriting the Earth.

The Social Network is most certainly not the film that we all imagined it would be. It is not Facebook: The Movie. Instead, it is the modern tale of one young man’s ambition, of his drive to recreate the world in his own image. It’s a terrific film, one that everyone ought to see. Not only will it inspire you, it will entertain and mesmerize you.

Few films in recent years have seemed as urgent or have captured an image of our modern times as accurately. But don’t think that The Social Network is only a film of the here-and-now; it’s a film primarily about ambition, and even if Facebook is a thing of the 21st century, ambition is timeless.