Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is a sweet but ultimately flimsy film that relies too heavily on glib emotions and coincidental meetings. It does, however, have a sterling lead performance by Kat Dennings.

The film is set in one night in the New York City indie-rock club scene. Nick, played by Michael Cera, is pining after an ex-girlfriend (Alexis Dziena). He creates mix CDs for her, which she promptly gives to her friend, Norah (Dennings). Norah really doesn't like Dziena, but loves the mixes from Nick, who she has never met.

Cera is the bassist in a rock trio, and also the only straight guy in the band. He and his associates have a gig, in which Dziena is attendance, along with Dennings and her friend, Ari Graynor, who quickly becomes drunk. Dennings, trying to convince Dziena that she does have a love life, spots Cera and asks him to pretend to be her girlfriend for five minutes. Meanwhile, all of those involved are keen on finding out where a secret concert will be played by their favorite band, Where's Fluffy. Graynor is so drunk that Cera's bandmates promise to take her home, but they lose her, and she wanders the streets in a drunken haze.

Since it's been a long time since I was a teenager, I don't whether it's so ridiculously easy for high school kids to get alcohol in New York clubs. Perhaps it is. But I didn't find the comedy involving Graynor's character to be very funny. There have been too many horrible crimes involving bridge-and-tunnel girls who are drunk out of their minds. Her character is pathetic, not amusing.

There are also way too many coincidences for this story to bear. People keep running into each other with shocking regularity. Also, as someone who has driven a car into New York, the ease of finding parking spaces was in the realm of science fiction. A picayune matter, but it gnawed at me nonetheless.

And the love story between Nick and Norah was far too predictable. They meet cute, have adventures in the city, and of course he spurns his shallow and materialistic ex for the more down-to-earth girl. The only good wrinkle in this is that Dennings makes her character far more interesting than the usual woman who plays this kind of role. She is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but a character with insecurities and recognizable behavior patterns.

Cera is also good, but I would imagine about now he's itching to play something else. In Superbad, Juno, and now this film he's played essentially the same thing--a sensitive teen. If I were him I'd ask my agent to get me a role as a hit man, a cattle rustler, or a Musketeer--anything but another moony suburban teenager. Cera's main prop in the film is a distressed Yugo that is almost like a character--kudos to the prop department for finding that.

The names Nick and Norah are a tip of the hat to the detectives created by Dashiell Hammett and played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series of films. They were sophisticated and clever, and I don't know if this Nick and Norah are meant to be the 2008 equivalent. For one thing, they don't solve crimes, and for another, they're not particularly witty. Naming your characters those names sets some high expectations, and they are not met in this film. It just never clicked with me, right from the beginning, and I never was able to find my way in and get involved in more than a superficial way. The direction, by Peter Sollett, is serviceable, but nothing special, and the screenplay (an adaptation of a novel) aims to be the kind of wordy teenage angst stuff that made Juno a success, but falls short here.