by MATTHEW HAYS

Adam Penenberg still can't believe it. Not the fact that Stephen Glass, a staff writer at the prestigious political mag The New Republic in the late '90s, made up a whack of stories. That much Penenberg, the journalist who busted Glass, has gotten over.

Now, sitting at the Toronto International Film Festival - where the movie about Glass's astonishing rise to glory and precipitous crash, Shattered Glass, is having its premiere - Penenberg is annoyed about another thing. Glass has been hired to write an article about Canada's loosening pot laws for Rolling Stone. No kidding; one of the most disgraced figures in journalism, now a household name in any media type's home, was hired by Stone publisher Jann Wenner, apparently because Glass was apologetic enough. "I can't believe that," says Penenberg with a sigh. "I guess Glass turned on the charm again."

Detecting deceit

It's a bizarre twist to this story, one that gives Penenberg a wicked sense of déjà vu. It was five years ago when Penenberg, then employed by Forbes Online to cover the Internet business beat, was reprimanded by his editor for "missing" a great story about the shenanigans going on at a hackers' convention. Bruised at having missed such a great story, Penenberg sat down at his computer to plan a follow-up. Trouble was, Penenberg kept entering domain names from Glass's now-infamous story and found that none of them came up on a Web search. Not only that, companies in the piece didn't appear to exist. Too-good-to-be-true quotes couldn't be attributed to anyone. And proposed legislation discussed in the piece didn't exist either. After poring over the piece with a fact checker, Penenberg found only one thing in this story could be confirmed: that indeed, America does have a state of Nevada.

This real-life sequence is one of the pivotal scenes in Shattered Glass, the taut, hugely entertaining tale of the fabulist reporter who made up almost half of the cover stories he wrote for NR from scratch. What could have been a movie only for media insiders, or a simply insipid made-for-TV psychological profile, is instead played as a sinister detective story. The passive-aggressive, obsequious Glass is brought to life brilliantly by Hayden Christensen, while Steve Zahn portrays Penenberg and Montrealer Cas Anvar plays the Forbes Online editor.

Saying is believing

Penenberg says that director Billy Ray (an experienced screenwriter who here makes his directorial debut) stuck so closely to the facts that when Penenberg visited the Montreal set almost two years ago, he found the experience downright eerie. "There's a scene where we were interrogating Glass on a conference call," Penenberg says. "That was very strange for me to watch, because that was dialogue I'd actually said. For some reason, that scene wasn't entirely working in rehearsal, but Billy took Hayden aside and told him to play the scene as though he actually believed what he was saying. That made it. When you watch this scene, you can see the editor's controlled rage, while Hayden, as Glass, seems to actually believe his own far-fetched story. In the end, like O.J., I think he believed his own lies."

Glass didn't just lie - he tried to cover up his lies, elaborately. Peter Sarsgaard plays his NR editor at the time, Michael Kelly, who ended up pushing Glass into a confession and then firing him. When Glass had to prove that a company existed, he thew up his own rather crude Web site - Penenberg did a screen capture on Glass's faked Web site home page, and that's what we see in the movie - lending the film even more realistic credibility.

There are loads of theories about why Glass did what he did. And even after writing his thinly-veiled fictional account of what happened, The Fabulist (which tanked despite a 60 Minutes lead story), the public still doesn't really know why. Penenberg just feels that Glass is a skilled performer, a driven pathological liar. Part of the strength of Shattered Glass is that it doesn't try to explain the psychological roots of its protagonist's pathology.

"There's no way to ever know why Glass did what he did. The only person you can ever find out from is Glass himself. And if he told you, would you believe him?"

Shattered Glass opens Friday, Nov. 14

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