An "After Hours" Revamp as a Smart, Affecting Teen Comedy with an Indie Rock Beat

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 2009)

I was all prepared to trivialize this movie for what I expected to be another hipster teen comedy taking advantage of the success of "Juno" and "Superbad", especially given that Michael Cera is the co-star of all three films. However, this 2008 movie is really a quirky, sharply played variation on Martin Scorsese's 1985 "After Hours", this time focusing on two misfit teens, kindred spirits when it comes to their taste in music, who find themselves traipsing through New York's indie rock scene for one hilariously sleepless night. Their chemistry is predestined by their names, a tribute to the scintillating married couple played by William Powell and Myrna Loy in "The Thin Man" series of golden-era Hollywood classics. Their nocturnal misadventures are driven by Nora's search for her hard-partying best friend Caroline, who escaped in a fit of paranoia out of a van, while gay-band bassist Nick is nursing a broken heart over Tris, the shallow, man-baiting ex-girlfriend who continues to play him.
If the movie simply limited itself to the odyssey, it would have been satisfying enough for its intended audience, but what director Peter Sollett and screenwriter Lorene Scarfaria have done to transcend the genre is make the lead characters' mutual passion for music the focal emotional point of their growing attraction for one another. Nick keeps sending Tris idiosyncratic mix CDs (like "Road to Closure, Vol. 12"), which she tosses into the trash only to provide Nora an opportunity to retrieve them and listen to reflections of his broken heart. Neither is able to articulate their feelings otherwise, as shown by their comically bumbling conversations, so the music plays a vital part of their burgeoning relationship. I still don't find Cera terribly versatile, but he has been resourceful in using his now-familiar screen persona of a dweebish sad-sack in suitably well-turned material.
Familiar as Catherine Keener's edgy but ultimately caring daughter in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", Kat Dennings comes into her own as Norah, capturing the insecurity of a character who leaves herself wide open to the pain inflicted by those around her. There are scene-stealing turns by Ari Graynor as the constantly drunken Caroline, Alexis Dziena as self-appointed goddess Tris, and Rafi Gavron and Aaron Yoo as Nick's club-friendly gay bandmates. There are a couple of "Saturday Night Live" cast cameos thrown in - "newscaster" Seth Meyers as the horned-up passenger mistaking Nick's yellow Yugo as a cab (with Scarfaria as his girlfriend) and Andy Samberg as a bum lurking on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The alt-rock music is appropriately underground to fit the story. There really isn't that much more to the movie since the fate of these characters is clear from the outset.
It's simply that the film has good energy fueled by the constant barrage of music and smart dialogue to fill the love story that emerges from their long night's journey into morning. There are a surprising number of extras with the 2009 DVD starting with two separate commentaries, the first with Sollett, Cera, Dennings and Graynor discussing the production details, and the second with Sollett and the source novel's writers, Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, in which they discuss more of the story and screen adaptation. There are deleted scenes and outtakes, some quite funny but understandably excised, and an amusingly off-kilter Nick & Norah puppet show by Dennings. Rounding out the extras are storyboards, photo galleries, Graynor's video diary, a music video, and a funny faux-interview with Cera and Dennings.