First, it must be understood that the Nick and Norah, proprietors of this infinite playlist, are of no discernible relation to Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Thin Man, which became a series of six boozily banter-intensive movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy in the ’30s and ’40s.
This has be explained up front because movie critics like to feel important, which means making you wait for the information you came here for by spouting off about how nobody in Nick & Norah’s target demographic has heard of the Thin Man movies anyway, damn kids, with their Twitter-frazzled attention spans.
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From “Arrested Development”to a developing love interest, Michael Cera stays geeky and chic alongside Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. |
It is possible, however, that five more movies like this one will fill the coming years—that, indeed, by decade’s end there’ll be a whole Netflix subcategory of Teen Movies With Squiggly Hand-Drawn Opening Credits and Alt-Pop Soundtracks and Michael Cera.
The first such film was Juno, in which Cera impregnated a 16-year-old girl and then revealed himself to be geekily adorable to her. In Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, he’s still rocking that whole “geekily adorable” concept, but his mission here is to get over getting dumped by one young lady and woo and satisfy another who’s never had an orgasm. What a trooper, this guy.
Not to say Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a mere sex comedy, although, as Cera’s Nick complains early on to the gay mates in his queercore band, the Jerk Offs, “You don’t know what it’s like to be straight, O.K.? It’s awful.” Magnanimously, they take him out for a night on the town, first to play a gig and then to track down a secret show by an indie-kid-approved band called Where’s Fluffy?
The town is New York, and it’s looking good. For starters, parking is never a problem. Plus, there’s Norah (Kat Dennings), a softly sarcastic beauty with a mysterious, plot-relevant way of being waved in by bouncers at every club she visits.
She’s the one who’s orgasmically challenged, yes, and Nick’s mates (Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron) figure she’s the one for him. And of course the movie, adapted by Lorene Scafaria from Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s young-adult novel and directed by Peter Sollett, of the well-liked 2003 NYC-teen-drama Raising Victor Vargas, wants us to agree.
It’s just that Nick’s still not over Tris (Alexis Dziena), the bitchy blonde with no shortage of makeup and confidence and no surplus of wit and taste, whom Norah happens to despise.
And so, bring on the night. Our titular clubbers’ courtship is a halting one, flitting between vignettes and containing minor obstacles. What Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist lacks in dramatic structure it almost makes up for in good casting and chatty, light-romancey charm. And, of course, the Infinite Playlist playlist, though finite, contains the likes of Devendra Banhart, Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, and an original score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the Michael Cera of film composers.
Though it will find its audience, this movie doesn’t seem like a signature work for Sollett, not in the same way two movies it evokes, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, did for their directors. But what do these damn kids today care about those old relics anyway?