A Gary Thompson production: Gary interviews Aaron Sorkin

TALENTED AS Orson Welles was, one wonders if he could have made "Citizen Kane" about a guy who was only 26 - barely old enough to shave, let alone build Xanadu, and the media empire that defined his time. But that's the problem that faced Aaron Sorkin when he signed up to write "the Social Network," a movie that examines the prickly personality and rise to power of Mark Zuckerberg, just 19 when he began to build his Facebook empire, just 21 when lawsuits arose to challenge his throne.

And, yes, just 26 when a major Hollywood movie arrives, a movie that begins and ends with people describing him as a part of the anatomy associated with proctology.

The movie is tough on Zuckerberg, that's true. It's also more nuanced on its subject than you might expect, a fact that Sorkin says has much to do with Zuckerberg's tender age.

"My first thought was that when I was 26 years old, I was a bartender writing 'A Few Good Men' on cocktail napkins. I wasn't running a company the size of General Motors, so you have to really take your hat off to this young man," said Sorkin, in town last week to talk about the movie.

You take your hat off, then carefully read the lawsuits claiming Zuckerberg stole the Facebook idea and backstabbed the friend who bankrolled it and believed in him. Sworn statements taken from the parties involved form much of the movie's content.

"All of these people went into the deposition room and swore an oath and all told different stories. Rather than choose one of the stories, we decided to embrace the idea that there are all these different stories, there is a 'Rashomon' quality to the whole thing.

"The movie doesn't take a position on what the truth is. It shows as much of everybody's version as it can. I think the scales kind of tip toward [Zuckerberg] quite often in the movie," Sorkin said.

The plaintiffs include Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (twins played by a single actor, Armie Hammer), Harvard rowers who pitched a Facebook-like idea to Zuckerberg, who then set about designing his own version of it.

The other is roommate and friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who's already amassed a small fortune through futures trading when he puts up the money to finance Zuckerberg's nascent enterprise, called the thefacebook.com, which as a start-up serves student communities at private universities.

If Zuckerberg is a latter-day Kane, his Rosebud isn't a sled, it's a girl, a coed who dumps him when he clumsily insults her. The breakup sends Zuckerberg home to write an ugly blog post, and to perpetrate an equally ugly cyber stunt that invites Harvard students to rate girls based on their stolen photos.

These scenes not only help define Zuckerberg, they hint at Sorkin's suspicious view of Internet communication in general, an attitude common to his generation (he's 50), and one that infuses "The Social Network."

"Every generation finds something in the generation behind them that is sinister and screwing up the world. And none of us wants to be the grandparent who says, 'You kids with the clothes and the hair and the music.' But I don't think we're wrong to see something sinister here. There's a removal from reality that is something I think

we're right to look askance at," he said.

Sorkin started visiting Facebook.com as soon as he started writing the script, and as a writer, a fashioner of fiction, thought that he recognized a lot of amateur Sorkins online.

"When you make a wall post, there's a lot of awareness that you are performing. There seems to be a desire for people to reinvent themselves as something else. I recognize it because that's what I do, I write for the sake of performing. But I don't think that brings us closer together, which seems to be the overarcing mission of social networking. I think it drives us farther apart."

He also understands how social networking exploits a human need.

"I'd love to have people think I'm as fast and clever as the characters I write and not the awkward stumbling guy I am. I am shy, socially awkward. I understand the desire to want to do a rewrite and polish off your own life."

And so, in at least one way, he understands Zuckerberg, the uncomfortable misfit who created an arm's-length way to communicate, a contradiction the movie looks upon with more compassion than sarcasm. The movie is fairer than people think, Sorkin said, and more accurate.

"Here's all you need to know about the veracity of the piece. Any nonfiction screenplay about people who are living and who have proved that they are litigious and have the resources to be litigious and smash you to death . . . you can be sure that screenplay was vetted by a team of lawyers to within an inch of its life. There's no way in a million years they would have allowed us to make a movie that said something that was defamatory, that wasn't demonstrably true."

Zuckerberg is certainly aware that movie paints him in dark shades. He's called the movie "fiction." He's also recently consented to a profile in the New Yorker, and abruptly donated $100 million to Newark, N.J., schools. To some, that's a coincidental gesture of philanthropy, and to others, an admission that his image needs to be improved.

"I have to believe that their PR team is every bit as good as our PR team," Sorkin continued, "they're just saying it's fiction, over and over again. Obviously we disagree."

He's never spoken to Zuckerberg. "I wouldn't begrudge him any reaction. I have to tell you I would absolutely not want a movie made about the things that I did when I was 19 years old. Probably, hardly anybody would."