UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. >> At a critical moment in Michael Mann’s cyberthriller, "Blackhat," a naive security guard slips a young woman’s thumb drive into his corporate computer.

The camera lingers on the drive’s all-uppercase brand name: SONY. A few covert keystrokes later, the system is penetrated — one hacker, a good guy, is within reach of an illicit fortune stolen by another.

If this is not exactly cinematic art imitating life, the release of "Blackhat" by Universal Pictures next month will at least show spooky synchronicity with the very real hacking attack on Universal’s crosstown competitor, Sony Pictures. Set to open on Jan. 16, Mann’s movie is one of the most authentic film treatments of malicious hacking in memory — and it has been given added cultural urgency by inadvertently crossing paths with the Sony assault.

Hollywood has always had a hard time turning computer code and venomous software into captivating cinema. But Mann, who wrung three Oscar nominations from "The Insider," his 1999 story of a tobacco company whistle-blower, has spent years on "Blackhat," partly in an effort to bridge the gap between film and what he saw as an underappreciated mass threat posed by hackers.

"We’re not cutting edge in tech specificity — we’re engaged in our story — but we are close," Mann said Saturday of his film’s presentation of the hackers’ methods. (A "black hat" is jargon for a criminal hacker, in contrast to legitimate digital security experts, or "white hats.")

As for generating audience interest, Sony and North Korea may have ended up lending Universal marketers a hand.

"Blackhat," produced by Legendary Pictures for about $80 million, is arriving in near lock step with the devastating attack that has crippled Sony and that last week was declared a national security threat by President Barack Obama. Hackers digitally ransacked Sony, based in Culver City, Calif., in late November, resulting in the publication of private emails, Social Security numbers and other personal data.

The unprecedented attack, which was likely to have been carried out by North Korea, according to the FBI, ultimately led to terrorist threats on movie theaters and the cancellation of "The Interview," a Sony comedy that depicts the killing of Kim Jong Un, the current ruler of North Korea.

"The hack on Sony gave emotional stakes to the geeky hacking world," said Hemanshu Nigam, a former executive at News Corp. and the Motion Picture Association of America who now runs SSP Blue, an online security firm. Members of the mass audience, he said, finally realized, "This could be me, with my embarrassing personal email conversations and creative work in progress stolen for everyone to see."

"Blackhat" is the tale of one sophisticated, contemporary hacker on the trail of another. The film’s antihero, played by Chris Hemsworth, is promised his prison sentence will be commuted if he can stop a particularly malicious cyberterrorist who is using Hemsworth’s character’s own ingenious code.

The stakes are even higher than those in the Sony attack. "Blackhat" begins with a hack-induced explosion at a Chinese nuclear plant. The ensuing character-driven chase, grounded in Mann’s considerable research, involves cocky one-upmanship among hackers and stylistic touches to convey the invisible movement of malicious software (pinpoints of light creeping through a digital network, for instance, and typing shown from inside the keyboard looking out).

Mann has been making last-minute calibrations to his film, but even if he wanted to flick at what happened to Sony it would be too late. Still, "Blackhat," conceived 2 1/2 years ago, manages to be astonishingly current.

"How you invade a system usually involves some kind of social engineering," Mann said, like tricking an employee into enabling an attack, as with the fatal insertion of the seemingly innocent Sony thumb drive. In another moment from "Blackhat," a government agent is fooled into changing his security password. Some security experts have speculated that there were similar elements in the attack on Sony.

One of the film’s more striking messages, and a lesson that Hollywood has certainly learned over the last week, is that there are no international barriers to cybercrimes. Law enforcement agencies, restrained by local regulations and their own bureaucracies, chase invisible criminals who move with the ease of a keystroke from China to the United States to Malaysia and elsewhere.

Government officials have said the attacks on Sony appear to have been routed by North Korea through China and then conducted through servers in Singapore, Thailand and Bolivia.

Mann, whose films include "Ali," "Heat" and "Public Enemies," said he became interested in a hacker-centered story after spending time in Washington with government cyberdefense officials.

"What became apparent is that Washington knew — the White House, defense, law enforcement — how truly vulnerable we are to cyberintrusion," said Mann, who wrote the screenplay with Morgan Davis Foehl. They were, he said, "frustrated in getting defense contractors, banking and infrastructure providers to act on the need for robust cyberdefense."

He added: "Generally, people have little awareness of how porous we are. That gap in awareness was fascinating to me."

Universal declined to discuss its marketing plans for "Blackhat." People with knowledge of the studio’s plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid conflict with Universal, said no effort was being made to tie "Blackhat" to the Sony hacking in trailers, TV ads or other promotional materials.

According to these people, Universal is slightly concerned that the Sony attack might actually hurt "Blackhat" — ticket buyers could be tired of hacking stories after weeks of media attention on Sony, and a film that is too topical might strike potential viewers as less entertaining.

As a genre, cyberthrillers have been a challenge for Hollywood. Studios have repeatedly been drawn to the sophistication and latent power in the digital world, while wrestling with ways to make its abstractions cinematic.

Bill Condon, a filmmaker who won an Oscar for writing "Gods and Monsters," stumbled badly last year with "The Fifth Estate," about the WikiLeaks mastermind, Julian Assange. A $28 million DreamWorks Studios film, it generated only $8.6 million in worldwide ticket sales. In particular, Condon puzzled viewers with his portrayal of Assange’s virtual "submissions platform" as a stark office space filled, at one point, with rows of smiling Assanges.

"Sneakers," "WarGames," "The Net" and "Tron" — the 1982 fantasy in which Jeff Bridges engaged in combat with computer programs — did better in their time, though all faced the challenge of wrapping visual elements and human adventures around essentially invisible action.

Like "The Fifth Estate," the 1995 movie "Hackers," about computer-savvy high-schoolers involved with corporate extortion, was a notable miss, notwithstanding the popularity of its avant-garde electronic music soundtrack.

Ralph Winter, a producer of "Hackers," said the music was chosen by the movie’s director, Iain Softley, partly to lure young viewers to the intricacies of a digital plot.

"I think the soundtrack did better than the film," he said.

© 2014 The New York Times Company