Oct 2, 2008 12:48 pm US/Eastern
'Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist'
NEW YORK (AP) ―
Someday, Michael Cera will show us what else he can do. He surely must have someone else inside him besides the poignantly verbal but sweetly awkward nerd we've come to know and love in such movies as "Superbad" and "Juno," and the late, great TV series "Arrested Development."
For now, though, Cera is that guy again, but he also shows some potential as a viable romantic lead -- albeit an unconventional one.
He and Kat Dennings have a lively, easy chemistry with each other as a couple of high school seniors prowling the streets of New York on an all-night quest to find their favorite underground band.
Cera's Nick is an average middle-class New Jersey kid who is obsessed with Tris (Alexis Dziena), the unfaithful ex-girlfriend who dumped him, and the CD mixes he makes for her of his favorite indie rock tunes aren't winning her back.
But they do win the heart of Dennings' Norah, a classmate of Tris' who thinks Nick must be the coolest guy in the world, based solely on his musical taste. One night, through a convoluted confluence of events, Nick and Norah find themselves thrown together.
The comedy from Peter Sollett ("Raising Victor Vargas"), based on the book by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, is aimed squarely at 20-something hipsters, but it's a worthy successor to those 1980s John Hughes movies that were sweetly romantic without trying hard to be.
PG-13 for mature thematic material including teen drinking, sexuality, language and crude behavior. 89 min. Three stars out of four.
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