FILM

Making Good Music
‘Nick and Norah’ spins adolescent awkwardness into cinematic gold.

By Greg Marzullo
Friday, October 03, 2008

Teen angst rarely transcends the trite, but in “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” the tropes of growing up go from treacly to charming.

At the heart of the story are the pitfalls of high school-aged romantic relationships, complete with sexual awakenings and emotional mine fields, and the title characters, played by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, move from one embarrassing vulnerability to the next, reminding us of universal youthful dalliances and their revelations.

The film opens on Nick in a depressive funk over his on/off girlfriend Tris (a wonderful Alexis Dziena), but as the only straight member of a band called the Jerk-offs, the show must go on, which means a performance in downtown New York. His gay bandmates (played by Rafi Gavron and Aaron Yoo) are refreshingly not just one-gag jokes, but full characters who care deeply about their straight bud and his romantic health.

At their gig, Nick sees Tris with another guy, but Norah, there with her best drunken friend Caroline (a hysterical Ari Graynor), falls for Nick’s onstage cuteness, and then through happenstance, the pair end up traveling through the Big Apple, first trying to find the secret venue of their favorite band and then trying to find Caroline who spends much of the night wandering the city in a drunken stupor.                   

Along the way, they discover they’ve got more in common with each other than with their respective tenuous significant others (Norah’s sometime musician boyfriend is only into her because of her big-time music producer father), and despite some rocky terrain — including a well-landed punch by Norah — the pair find true love in the end.
   
SURE, THE FILM sounds like any number of teen romance movies, but given the performances and multilayered script (written by Lorene Scafaria), the story becomes much more.

Despite being pegged as Hollywood’s emotionally reserved and ironic awkward teen boy, Cera appeared different here than in other similar portrayals. Finding the little boy in this burgeoning young man, Nick becomes the perfect bridge between childhood and adulthood, full of earnest hopes, yet prematurely jaded by a fear of rejection and a tempestuous relationship history.

Dennings, too, captures the conflicted feelings of adolescence. She maintains a smart girl’s exterior, tossing off righteous indignation about typically pretty girls like Tris, yet she barely conceals a fear of not being desirable or lovable.

Shortly after the gay boys offer to take Caroline home so Nick and Norah can spend time together, the film turns into a modern quest movie. The pair, later joined by a small gay entourage, which now includes a guy picked up by one of the bandmates, journey through that new archetype of the dangerous wilderness — Manhattan.

The Port Authority bus terminal becomes a way station for Caroline as she wanders the city looking for Norah. The young couple-to-be fend off the amorous limbs of an adult pair who hop into Nick’s yellow Yugo thinking it’s a taxi. Nick learns from one of his gay friends what love is all about while sitting in the back of the band’s van and looking out into the neon-lit urban landscape.

All these madcap adventures might sound like too much for one film, and in a couple of cases, they are (a running joke with a piece of gum becomes a tiresome comic albatross by the closing frames). But when the credits role, it’s hard not to get a warm, fuzzy feeling about young love.

It doesn’t matter whether or not you had that exact experience. “Nick and Norah” doesn’t remind us of specifics in our own early romantic yearnings, but of an overall hazy feeling of love, desire, god-awful choices and a carefree sense of adventure, and the film does it all without threatening to become a spoon-fed sitcom.





                           

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