Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist: Enchanted Evening

Though his voice is stuck in an uncomfortable prepubescent register, Michael Cera has the gift of appearing both wise beyond his years and not at all happy about it. In Juno and Superbad and, before that, on Arrested Development, Cera has displayed that stricken look, as if he’d received a vision of what life has in store for him, and it worries him sick. He seems prematurely 40, so that any teen trauma has the impact of a midlife crisis or some awful dream endlessly repeating itself. As Nick O’Leary in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, he’s the theoretically cool bass player in a band playing a Manhattan club. Except that the band is called the Jerk Offs, the other two members are gay, their audience includes blasé members of Nick’s New Jersey high school, and one of them is Tris (Alexis Dziena), the girl Nick has nakedly and mostly unrequitedly adored for ages.

One of the acuities of this smart, sweet, bordering-on-adorable romantic comedy is its awareness that by senior year, teens have been stuck for so long in their designated roles — nerd, vamp, rebel hottie — that they feel like indentured servants to them. The most agreeable myth of the movie, directed by Peter Sollett and scripted by Lorene Scafaria, from a novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, is that spending a night in New York City can crack the shell of stereotype to reveal your utterly cool inner life to someone who turns out to be your soul mate. For Nick, that would be Norah Silverberg (Kat Dennings), whose top-girl hauteur masks her discontent with every punk-star wannabe who wants a recording contract with her music-producer father. She doesn’t need leeches; she wants a boyfriend. Just not the quiet, doomed bassist in a queercore band.

Awkward pain is not exactly news in teen movies. John Hughes got it just right in his Brat Pack pictures of the mid-’80s (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and their kin), and so did the never-to-be-equaled Heathers. Nick & Norah just takes adolescent isolation a step further by ditching the parent figures and leaving the kids to forge their own ethics and agendas on one make-or-break night in Gotham. The plot’s twin spurs are that Norah has to keep tabs on her alkie friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) — her nickname is Winehouse — and that a favorite mystery band, Where’s Fluffy, may be playing a concert tonight and the teens will stay in town until they locate the venue.

Nick’s pathetic ardor for Tris has a surface plausibility, since she’s been assembled from the used parts of a teen boy’s fantasy. With her full mouth, caterpillar eyebrows, Naugahyde breasts and the inspiration, when aroused, to crawl onto a guy’s car hood and leave her lipstick imprint on the windshield, she could be this year’s Angelina Jolie knockoff. On the downside is her habit of ignoring Nick or, if she notices the guy, humiliating him. (“Can we go straight to laughing about this?” he asks after one abashing incident. That’s his cure for a broken heart: instant irony.) Tris is pretty catty to Norah as well. That’s why Norah sidles up to Nick, at random, asks him to be her boyfriend for five minutes and gives him a kiss it’ll be hard to shake off.

Who wouldn’t be smitten by Norah? As incarnated by Dennings, who has come of age nicely since playing Catherine Keener’s daughter in The 40 Year-Old Virgin three years ago, she has the poise of a privileged child — getting hit on by guys is just an occupational hazard — and is cocooned in her persona. So she’s a good match for Nick, who is beyond being embarrassed by driving a battered yellow Yugo that strangers mistake for a taxi or carrying Handi Wipes in his pocket. They also like the same music, which can unite the most disparate souls. The big problem is his devotion to Tris, which baffles Norah (“I could floss with that girl”). That’s Nick’s cage; he’s a bit too at home in his misery. He is who he is, until Norah helps him be someone better.

Much of Nick & Norah was shot on the Lower East Side, a grimy area that Sollett polishes into a wonderland where parking spaces are always available and the street people are genial poets. He has also enlisted stalwarts from Saturday Night Live (Seth Meyers, Andy Samberg) and the Harold & Kumar movies (John Cho). But this film doesn’t need the validation of older comics; it’s got winning stars in their early 20s who are true both to this moment and to old star quality. In the 1930s, Hollywood had The Thin Man, with the married couple Nick and Nora Charles as the epitome of Manhattan swank. Though this Nick and Norah have a lot more angst, they’re just as worth watching, admiring and cuddling up to.