It's an old joke that if journalists don't have any news then they make it up. Shattered Glass is based on a true story of a young journalist, Stephen Glass, who literally made up quotations, people, events and whole stories. What's more, he wasn't writing for some sensational tabloid, but the supposedly august New Republic. Also, he freelanced for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Harper's and George, at least until Buzz Bissinger September 1998 Vanity Fair expose on which Shattered Glass is based.

Management at the New Republic worries about its relatively low circulation (81,500) and there is a drive to find new readers. With a re-design and more pictures ruled out, the conditions are ripe for the rise of the youngest writer on their staff, the gifted Mr Glass (Hayden Christensen), whose colourful scoops no-one can compete with.

Much of this is told through narrative voice-over with Glass recalling these halcyon days in a speech to a classroom of media students.

However, the glory is shortlived. A journalist from a new media magazine starts probing one of Glass's celebrated features about how a computer hacker extorted a fortune from a large software company. As he discovers more and more holes in the story Glass's world starts caving in.

Debut director Billy Ray is in danger of over-complicating the narrative, chopping back and forth between different time frames to give the film a more dramatic thrust and some of the scenes where the ambitious and eager-to-please Glass wows the staff at editorial meetings have a false ring to them.

You have to ask whether some of the falsehoods on which Glass's demise were predicated were deliberately made more glaring - dumbed-down - for mainstream cinema audiences. Surely the rigorous fact-checking dept. of what we are told, more than once, is "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One" would have caught some of these?

In spite of these caveats, the human drama that unfolds is a compelling one. Christensen gives a notably slippery performance. The battle between the solitary, besieged editor Chuck (Peter Sarsgaard) and news editor Caitlin (Chloe Sevigny), who takes Glass under her wing, is particularly effective. As the gloss begins to peel off their fresh-faced and increasingly desperate prodigy their world turns upside-down.