LOS ANGELES  At the New York Film Festival next month, Hollywood will unleash “The Social Network,” a biting tale of the Silicon Valley giant Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Now Facebook must decide whether to bite back.

After fretting for months over how to respond, the company appears to have decided that its best bet is to largely ignore the movie and hope that audiences do the same  that “The Social Network” will be another failed attempt to bottle a generation, like “Less Than Zero,” and not culturally defining, as it aspires to be, in the way of “Wall Street” or “The Big Chill.”

Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Zuckerberg and his colleagues have been locked in a tense standoff with the filmmakers, who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals, then fueled by the unappeasable craving of almost everyone for “friends”  the Facebook term for those who connect on its online pages  that they will never really have.

Mr. Zuckerberg, at 26 a billionaire, and his associates are wary of damage from a picture whose story begins with the intimacy of a date night at Harvard seven years ago and depicts the birth of a Web phenomenon in his dorm room.