Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

We don't review a lot of teen movies on this site, and when we do, they're the R-rated ones, so let's see what I can do with this.  

For starters, I guess I have to thank Mitchell Hurwitz once again for giving us Arrested Development, which in turn gave us Michael Cera, who is sort of the Ipod generation's Anthony Michael Hall.  (Although I doubt very much he will turn into a musclebound brute the way Hall did.)

I guess I then have to thank Judd Apatow on two counts:  (1) For elevating the teen comedy, once again, to the level it was at in the '80's when John Hughes was in his prime, and teens were thinking about how to fall in love and have sex, and not how to poop and fart and throw up and have sex.  In other words, Apatow kept the chemistry in the mix (as in bodily functions), but subsidized it with heaping doses of romantic chemistry (as in having the characters - even the two boys at the head of Superbad - actually care for each other, and express it, however awkwardly).  And, (2) I have to thank, and the world should thank, Apatow for giving us Kat Dennings.  (Her first big role was as Catherine Keener's daughter in The 40 Year Old Virgin.)

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is not an exceptional teen comedy, but what it shows is that teen comedies are headed back in the right direction.  As the crass, disposable, utterly useless drivel that was College proved, the raunch of the Apatow formula is not what is appealing.  Audiences want to feel a connection with the characters of a movie even if the formula is tried and true and the outcome premeditated by thousands of romantic comedies from yesteryear.

Nick & Norah begins with the typical teen rom-com set-up, showing the dysfunctional lives of the two romantic leads.  Nick (Michael Cera) has been dumped by his sleep-around girlfriend, Tris (Alexis Dziena), and doesn't feel like leaving his house again for the rest of his life.  Norah (Kat Dennings) is a goodie two-shoes rich girl who is sick of every band geek she meets asking if she can get them in good with her famous record producer father.  (He, evidently, was responsible for some Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and David Bowie recordings.)  

Both are obsessed with music, and are the type of people that would know who the drummer was on some 7-inch that was released in 1986 with only 500 pressings.  Nick, in fact, is one of those Cameron Crowe characters who makes mixed CDs for his ex-girlfriend in hopes of winning her back, and does his own artwork for these mixed CDs, but ruins any kind of mending effect the CD would have by calling it Road to Closure Vol. 12.  Norah, in a coincidence that only happens in the movies, happens to somehow know Tris but not Nick, and always picks Nick's mixed CDs out of the trash after Tris unceremoniously throws them away.  And she loves them.  These two are meant for each other.

The endless night that encompasses all but the prologue of Nick & Norah begins with the announcement that the reclusive, rabidly-sought after band Where's Fluffy will play an impromptu concert at a yet-to-be-revealed venue when the clock strikes two in the morning, or whenever.  Both Nick and Norah, of course, are obsessed with Where's Fluffy, so Nick's all-gay emo band, The Jerk-Offs, drags him out of his asylum, and Norah decides to go along with her alcoholic, anything goes best friend, Caroline (Ari Graynor), mostly to make sure she stays out of trouble.

There is an incredible string of coincidences that leads to a meet-cute between Nick and Norah that finally gets the movie going, but once you get past the coincidences, and the two characters actually start to talk to each other, the actors' charms rub off on you.  

Cera is such an unlikely romantic lead that it took me awhile to realize that's what he was.  He is gangly and awkward, and still appears to be a twelve year old trapped in a 20 year old's body.  Cera not only has sharp comic timing (honed, forcefully, by his years on Arrested Development, where any bad comedic actor would have been relegated to set dressing by the talent around them), but a Benjamin Braddock-like ability to blend pathos into the laughter so that you have to judge whether to laugh or cry.  It would be interesting to see what Cera could do with a project like The Graduate, where he would be forced to sharpen his comedy to such a fine point, it almost wouldn't be there.  The laughter would be lethal.

Dennings, as far as I am concerned, is in the upper class of young actresses.  Along with Ellen Page and Olivia Thirlby, Dennings is strikingly beautiful, but her beauty masks both an intelligence and vulnerability that Megan Fox and Blake Lively could only dream of.  Nick & Norah is not the movie to show off what she is capable of, but it hints at it.  There are scenes where Norah is crushed by her insecurities, and Dennings shows both the glancing blow and the reflexive shield of caustic sarcasm that Norah wields in defense.  If Dennings continues to grow in independent roles and doesn't subscribe to middling studio fare, she could have a career not unlike Debra Winger's.

I have high hopes for these two, and Nick & Norah is a good exercise for them.  It's a little bit smarter than it needed to be and a little bit better written, but it doesn't break the mold.  I was pretty sure as soon as the lights went down that they'd be arm in arm when the lights went up an hour and a half later, and I knew they would eventually rescue the drunk girl from whatever trouble she got herself into, and I knew they'd get to see Where's Fluffy, but these are good things.  It's nice to see two people like Cera and Dennings together.  Two people who are not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.  Two people more like you and I.