A night on the town with Nick and Norah..

"I told em to give me the ellen deGeneres haircut" - Nick (Michael Cera)

I am told that the 1950’s first marked the beginning of a new era. The rise of the “teenager” gave birth to a type of youth empowerment in America the likes of which we had never seen before. The teen has been given prominence all throughout the history of the silver screen as well. Remember James Dean in the 50’s classic Rebel Without a Cause? The brilliant portrayal of a small town high school full of disillusioned dreams in The Last Picture Show? John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club still offers the blueprint for typical high school archetypes in the films that have followed it. Which begs the question: does anyone else feel that Michael Cera would be perfectly casted as Anthony Michael Hall’s character in a Breakfast Club remake? I’ll leave it to the few of you who have never seen the movie even once out of the 10,000 times it has been on cable to do the research yourself. Fast forward to 2008 where recently I had the chance to screen the newest film of teens in their element.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist tells the story of a young teen searching for love against the backdrop of the indy music scene in New York City. Nick (Michael Cera) has just broken up with his main squeeze after 6 months, and needless to say is feeling a little down. With the help of his bandmates, and new-found love interest Norah (Kat Dennings), the group sets out to find a local band playing a show at an undisclosed location, and hopefully bring fulfillment to Nick and Norah’s love life.
For the most part this film plays like the bulk of the characters in it: empty, and directionless. Nick loves his girlfriend, but she just doesn’t like him like that. But then, OMG! She keeps “bumping” into him in the city with her new squeeze. Should Nick totally go back to Trish, or hook up with Norah? Yeah, that’s pretty much the whole movie. It’s kind of like Lost in Translation for kids who were only 11 when that movie came out. Except here, there are some surprisingly decent comedic actors given very little to do or say. The all too familiar territory makes it a story about a few kids who are often endearing but rarely interesting.

The film does a masterful job of portraying the times that the American teenager finds itself in. There’s so little going on in the script that the general ambivalence towards anything of social relevance is captured by these real-life twenty-somethings accurately. They are independent, sexually active, and anchored to their cell phones. The kids portrayed in this film pick and choose from a myriad of ideologies and religious beliefs to interest themselves in, while there seems to be no one thing that defines any of them. Norah says “I heard a Jewish saying once that says….” To which the response of her indy geek love interest says something to the effect of “like….totally”. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that a movie has to try to be deep to be effective. Some films wear it on their sleeve like Garden State, which this film does not try to be, save from the indy music soundtrack. At the end of the day, I just want a little something to keep me from looking at my watch every 20 minutes.

2.5/5