Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
I’ll begin by quoting Danny Glover and suggest “I’m too old for this s**t”. You know when you sit down to watch a movie that you know is one generation behind you? Well, that is the impression I had of Nick and Norah prior to watching it. At roughly twice the age of most of the lead roles here, I didn’t really have any expectations about finding some equal ground or some bridged gap to understand the notions of the protagonists.
I don’t believe I was ever part of the producers target demographic for the film so my opinion will be largely meaningless to those of a certain age, I expect.
Lately, I have been thinking about the kind of movies that will resonate for those movie-goers that are currently in their late teens or early twenties. .
For me, those enduring images of Molly Ringwald, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe and Keifer Sutherland will always be with me, and I wonder if the movies that are being produced for this generation will have that same lasting appeal, evoking memories of a more carefree time.
Will Nick and Norah fit that bill? Well, I wonder. Michael Cera and Kat Dennings do produce a pair of believable and credible angsty performances in the lead roles and many of the same youthful inadequacies are studied here as they are in many of the teenage brat pack movies of the mid-eighties. There are no more answers provided here, however, than in previous attempts, and as a grown-up, you do take solace in the fact that these kids are just as fumbling and confused as you were at the time.
Told over the period of one long night, searching for the infamous band that play secret shows in different locales around New York, this love story will warm the heart. Over the course of the searching Nick and Norah eventually bump into one another, most notably for Norah’s need to pretend Nick is her boyfriend for five minutes to make her school rival, Tris (Alexis Dziena), eat her words.
When she kisses him, it becomes clear that Nick is, in fact, Tris’ ex-boyfriend and is the boy responsible for the compilation CD’s that ended up in Norah’s possession, due to Tris’ lack of compassion and total disregard for Nick in the first place.
Sounds unnecessarily complicated? Well, you might have a point. But these things, like young love, are never simple.
As Norah’s best friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) gets more and more drunk, then ‘kidnapped’, then lost, then sick in a bus station toilet, then at a gay and transvestite revue dressed as a Christmas Tree as part of the performance, the rest of the night unfolds with Norah searching the city for her friend, with Nick in tow, ferrying her around the town in his beat-up yellow Yugo, which looks to the nights’ revellers suspiciously like a Yellow cab.
As you can tell, the film is all over the place and the feeling of being lost is pretty much uppermost in all of the characters present, save for a couple of Nick’s band mates, who are alarmingly well adjusted given their circumstances. The pace of the film is well reigned in and you are neither bored nor rushed through the story. It is clichéd and predictable, but sometimes I expect that is what the movie going public want. Dennings is unusual as the rich girl with a vulnerable heart and not a brat with Daddy’s cash burning a hole in her pocket. Cera’s Nick is puppy-dog amiability wrapped up in a lack of fashion sense, but so honest, you genuinely feel the need to pat him on the head, buy him a comic and send him on his way, knowing that you have probably made his life a lot sweeter.
All in all, an inoffensive ninety or so minutes where if you don’t expect greatness you will come out of it with a little more change than you expected. Half a star for the soundtrack too.
