Lisa Johnson Mandell’s The Social Reckoning review tells you to put your phone away. The film will punish you if you don’t, and the irony is the point.

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin has made what I like to call a verbal action thriller. There are no explosions, no car chases, and no gratuitous sex to jolt you awake every twelve minutes. The pyrotechnics are all in the dialogue, which fires at a pace that makes most contemporary movies feel like they’re moving through molasses.

You must make the effort to process it as it flies past, because the film doesn’t pause to see whether you’ve kept up. Nobody stops to explain the plot or what it portends to the kids who are fooling around with the cell phones. After years of being spoon-fed, I practically weep with gratitude.

The story focuses on a singular battle, not on an entire war, and the film is smart enough to know it. Spanning 2019 to 2021, it dramatizes how Facebook engineer Frances Haugen teamed up with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz to expose the company’s most closely guarded secrets, the revelations that became known as the Facebook Files.

Haugen arrives believing she can help the company rather than hurt it, a belief the film tests, scene by scene, in boardrooms, interviews, and courtrooms. It is a tightly drawn skirmish in a conflict that did not end when the credits rolled, and it hasn’t ended now. The fight over what social platforms owe their users rages on, and it has since been joined by a second front: the fight over responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.

Sorkin has no illusions that an almost two-hour movie can settle any of this, and his film never pretends to. Its mission is to make us look squarely at what we’re dealing with. It asks, with real intellectual rigor, whether the people who build these platforms should answer for how users employ them. It lets both sides argue, forcefully and with great eloquence, and then trusts us to do the thinking.

That kind of respect for the audience has become a rare luxury.

None of this works without actors who can make Sorkin’s lofty, lightning-quick language sound like something a human being might actually say. This cast is at the top of its game.

The Social Reckoning review — Surprising performances

Mikey Madison is a revelation as Haugen, the earnest, idealistic nerd who believes in the system until the evidence makes that impossible. After her Oscar-winning turn in Anora, a performance that earned its praise but also left some critics reducing her to a single, much-discussed aspect of that role, Madison proves indisputably that she is a gifted actress who never needed to bare it all to make the case. Here she does it with intelligence, restraint, and a spine of steel, and she holds her own in a movie built from sentences that would flatten a lesser performer.

Jeremy Allen White refreshingly steps out of the kitchen to play the shrewd yet humble Horwitz, Wunmi Mosaku is dazzling in polished and imperious in her damage control expert glory, and Billy Magnussen, as an oily PR flack is a joy to watch — unless you’re a PR flack.

And then there is Jeremy Strong, who delivers a riveting take on Mark Zuckerberg. This is not the young, brilliant, socially awkward coder of The Social Network. Seventeen years on, that boy has become a single-minded corporate leader at war, and Strong plays every inch of the transformation. His Zuckerberg is controlled, imperious, and stiff in a way that feels deliberate, the posture of a man who has rehearsed his humanity and found it inefficient.

The performance brings to mind other singular geniuses, driven, socially unconventional, and consumed by a vision, who seem to operate by a different set of rules from the rest of us. It’s a transformation worth studying, and I suspect it will be debated all awards season.

I’ll admit the film worked on me personally, in ways I didn’t expect. I left with profound sympathy for the parents whose children can’t escape the cruelty of online bullying, a torment that follows them from the classroom to the bedroom and into their pockets.

I also came away with real respect for those who refuse to be manipulated by social media’s bad actors, the people who pause before sharing and doubt before they believe. And I have even greater admiration for the brave few who walk away from social media entirely.

Which brings me to the movie’s most lasting effect. It has me thinking that it’s time for a little social reckoning of my own.

Rated R

1 Hour 52 Minutes

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Lisa Johnson Mandell’s The Social Reckoning review tells you to put your phone away. The film will punish you if you don’t, and the irony is the point.