Antitrust is a market rarity: a techno-geek wish-fulfillment fantasy. Geeks chase other geeks with guns, geeks get to save the world from capitalism, geeks sleep with beautiful women . . . Are there enough geeks out there to keep this film afloat at the box office? Probably not, but I call on all geeks to catch it before it disappears from theatres.

Ryan Phillippe, who's one of the more talented of the latest crop of young-punk actors, plays Milo Hoffman, a computer programmer who's about to form a startup with a few buddies to produce a data delivery system whose source code they plan to distribute freely. A somewhat Utopian and self-defeating business plan, but nonetheless they have venture capitalists nipping at their heels.

But Milo is being wooed by Gary Winston (Tim Robbins), the multi-billionaire C.E.O. of NURV, a software company currently under investigation by the justice department. Now before you start seeing historical echoes, NURV is not Microsoft. For one thing, they seem to be into communications more than desktop or server software. For another thing, their coding language of choice is Java, which wouldn't wash with Gates and Co. And although Tim Robbins is doing a dead-on Bill Gates impression, he is Gary Winston, not Gates, William.

Watching a computer thriller is usually an exercise in cataloguing implausibilities, but credit the makers of Antitrust with doing their homework. They have the geek culture down cold, and use of real-life coding and scripting languages, not to mention hardware and storage media, adds to the verisimilitude. None of these scrolling ones and zeroes being stored on disks that look like credit cards yet work in every computer on the planet. Things get a little questionable once Milo starts playing amateur detective, investigating his boss by, for example, capitalizing on his knowledge of a building security application that it seems unlikely he'd be familiar with. Also, this "Synapse" technology that NURV is working on? Didn't really buy that. But compared with most hi-tech flicks, Antitrust is like a documentary.

Of course Winston is up to no good (using the exact same criminal tactics against competing firms that Bill Gates used against Homer Simpson's Internet startup, interestingly enough). Suddenly, Milo doesn't know who he can trust. But, duh. Dude's got one ultra-hot girlfriend (Claire Forlani), then gets a new job and finds himself being hit on by another hottie (Rachael Leigh Cook). For a techno-geek? Please--he should have known all along that someone was up there pulling the strings.

Antitrust doesn't do everything right. It's not as thrilling as a thriller might be. But it's a serious movie dealing with some up-to-date (if arcane) technological issues. Now will mainstream audiences be able to relate to a film in which the McGuffin is a compression algorithm? In which the main plot through-line is about the triumph of open source computer code?

I'm seriously doubting it. But to the guys who worked so hard on this picture: at least I enjoyed it, if it makes you feel any better. Nice job.