Fails to live up to its promise

Rating: 5/10 (19 April 2009)

With his roles in mainstream hits such as "Superbad" and "Juno," Michael Cera catapulted himself to the head of the class as the modern-day geek of choice for teen comedies (he's sort of to the 2000s what Molly Ringwald was to the 1980s, a figure average adolescents can relate to). In "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," Cera continues in that mode, playing a straight member of an otherwise all-gay rock band who can't get over the fact that his pretty but snooty girlfriend, Tris, has dumped him for another guy. One wild night, while in the city with his band mates, the lovesick Nick hooks up with Norah Silverberg, a less pretty but far more authentic girl who attends the same Catholic girls' school as Tris and who discovers, much to her delight, that, in Nick, she may have finally found her "musical soul mate."
With a screenplay by Lorene Scafaria (derived from the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan) and direction by Peter Sollett, "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" is an amiable but scattered little comedy that never seems to completely find its footing or to come up with any kind of purposeful meaning or direction. Filled with jokes and comic concepts that either don't lead anywhere or that simply fall flat, the movie fails to do justice to its youthful and exuberant cast that includes, in addition to Cera, Kat Dennings, Alexis Dziena, Aaron Yoo, Rafi Gavron, Ari Graynor and Jonathan B. Wright.
The movie does an impressive job not overly stereotyping its gay characters (though a little of that sneaks in anyway), and there are fleeting moments of tenderness and charm as Nick and Nora work on cementing their relationship, but the movie's lack of a clear-cut focus proves yet again that "niceness" alone isn't enough to guarantee a quality movie.