The recent feature film “State of Play” doesn’t try to spite technology or make a character of it. Instead, it puts on screen the very antagonism that bedevils filmmakers: the one between technology and drama. The movie turns an investigative reporter named Cal McAffrey (played by Russell Crowe) into a figure for analog values, including experience, memory, face-to-face interaction, moral ambiguity, dirt and ink. Initially, Cal assumes (fearfully) that “life” must exist in opposition to the Internet. Whenever he’s confronted with the profits, presumptions and conventions of the Web, he balks. You can imagine that his cry from the heart strikes a chord with traditional filmmakers as well as newspapermen. (Shouted at the Web, “This isn’t reporting!” could easily be “This isn’t filmmaking!”) For its part, the Internet plays an endearing straw man in “State of Play.” In one scene, Cal is shown surveying the Web site of a big company while he seeks out a corporate informer on the phone. “I need someone to dig a little deeper,” he says, meaning, presumably, deeper than the corporation’s home page.

As Cal sets out to prove to the blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), real reporting requires grit and shoe leather. His saltiness is silly, but he’s plainly right; only the shallowest investigations can be conducted on the Internet alone. At the same time, the film gives Della a legitimate hearing. A digital habitué, she’s drawn — as the best bloggers are — to documentation and verifiable facts; she resists narrative sleights of hand; she’s at ease with a hybrid of professional and personal life; she’s not sentimental about the booze, misery and squalor that Cal stipulates are hallmarks of the reporter’s life.

Nonetheless, it’s Della who delivers the Luddite message at the film’s end, when she and Cal have saved the day with a front-page story. “With a piece this big,” she says, “people should probably have newsprint on their hands when they read it.”

The line’s a groaner, perhaps — I heard actual groans in an L.A. theater — but it tracks with the film’s logic: life before the Internet, as well as modern-day life offline, is dirtier than life online. It’s less anonymous. It’s less aloof. Participants touch one another and get sullied and stained and implicated. This friction and filth may bring people closer to certain kinds of stories, but it may also produce certain kinds of stories.

Della and Cal’s front-page article — which is, through the course of the movie, retrieved in stinky places, including underground tunnels and open-air fish markets — may be best understood in ink. But for reporters or filmmakers bent on getting the truth, the Internet should be boisterously confronted (as on “24”) or ironically bracketed (as on “Damages”) but not limply wished out of existence (as in most mediocre entertainment). The Internet is reality now, a vast reality, at least as weird and complex a place as a soot-stained city or a scorching desert. As many problems as the Internet presents for traditional forms of representation, every serious journalist and filmmaker misses a big chance when he refuses to contend with it.

Points of Entry: THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS

THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY: Oh, but it’s way too late for that. To conjure the Internet in the old days, plan a Netflix festival. Include the bad and the good: “War Games” (1983), “The Net” (1995), “Hackers” (1995), “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), “The Matrix” (1999) and the bubble-era documentary “Startup.com” (2001).