One More Night: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist Reviewed

Roughly halfway through the wildly not wild night that Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings) spend together on the path to preordained love and happiness, Nick offers Norah a Handi Wipe so she can clean her hands after helping a sick friend clean up her vomit. It should be a throwaway moment, overly twee and an easy attempt at awkwardly cute humor for Mr. Cera--the lanky actor says that he had Chinese food a few weeks back and thought to hang on to the wipe as a "just in case" precaution. Instead, it feels like the most romantic thing a person could do for another. That's the type of movie Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is--slight, trite, contrived, predictable and yet so darn likeable and cute that you can't possibly find a reason to dislike it.

Based on the book by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is, as New York coined it, a classic "one crazy night" film. And it manages to touch on all the hallmarks of that sub-genre: there are wild characters met in the middle of the night (played in celebrity cameos by Seth Meyers, Andy Samberg, Kevin Corrigan), fights, ex-girlfriends, sometime-boyfriends, characters who go missing, and one over-arching event tying everything together--in this case, a secret show by the movie's fictional band "Where's Fluffy?" However unlike After Hours or Go, other classic "one crazy night" movies, where the events have a real life-or-death gravitas to them, there aren't any high stakes here. When you get right down to it, Nick and Norah is about a heartbroken boy who meets a shy girl and doesn't realize until the third act that he actually likes her. Basically that's it. If you've seen any John Hughes movie, you know the beats here.

So why does Nick and Norah work? Mainly, it's thanks to the cast, which starts with Mr. Cera and Ms. Dennings. The two youngsters have excellent chemistry, a must for the film to survive. Having followed Mr. Cera's career almost obsessively, I can say without a doubt that he's never had a female foil like Ms. Dennings. She's excellent here and it's a star making performance. Ms. Dennings comes off like a warmer Ellen Page with the figure of Scarlett Johanssen, and she pushes Mr. Cera to places that we haven't seen from him. He's still basically playing "Michael Cera", but for once he actually has to "man up" to prove himself worthy of Ms. Dennings' awesomeness. While Mr. Cera has definitely been funnier, it's a growth performance and bodes well for his future as the next John Cusack.

It's not just the leads though. The surrounding cast is lovely. Much has been written about Ari Graynor, and she's quite funny in a gimmicky and broad performance as Norah's drunken best friend (only in a movie as nice as this, would Ms. Graynor's Caroline not end up in a dire situation after wandering around Manhattan bombed off her ass). As Nick's gay bandmates, Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron are caring best friends always there with a stupid one-liner or pick-me-up. At one point, Mr. Yoo's Thom tells Nick that The Beatles had it all figured out. In the end, a boy just wants to hold a girls hand. Awwww.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist doesn't break any ground, and it's not even particularly laugh-out-loud funny; Judd Apatow this is not. But there is so much charm and happiness and goodwill here, that none of it matters. At a brisk 90 minutes (it actually feels like 70), the film manages to make you feel good by the time the credits roll. How much can you say that about nowadays?