As Horwitz, White serves up a classic, muted portrayal of a guy so dedicated to his job that he’s seriously fun-deprived. Oddly enough, it takes a smart, ultra-serious tech engineer to loosen him up, and his scenes with Madison, in which their characters banter and spar, are the movie’s best. At one point he refers to Frances as a Cassandra, citing the story of the cursed Trojan princess who has the gift of predicting the future, though no one believes her. Only he’s mangled and misapplied the myth; Frances sets him straight, and fills him in on the correct metaphorical meaning of Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf as well. It’s Madison who anchors the movie. Frances wears studious-schoolgirl glasses, and she suffers from neuropathy: In chilly San Francisco, she needs to bundle up in chunky leg warmers and wristlets to keep numbness at bay—this garb gives her a waifish air. At one point she describes herself as “the girl in class with her hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call on.” That’s a mouthful of classic Sorkinese if ever there were one, but as she spins the words out, Madison is so plaintive that she makes you see that girl. Frances Haugen is the conscience and the true hero of The Social Reckoning, and Sorkin knows it. He practically hands the movie over to Madison, and even in a movie filled with talking—and often with guys talking—it’s her stalwart yet unassuming presence that makes it sing.