"Nick & Nora's Infinite Playlist"

If his friends were doing an online dating profile for their high school chum Nick (Michael Cera), who co-stars in Nick & Nora’s Ultimate Playlist, directed by Peter Sollett, written by Lorene Scafaria, based on the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, and her friends were doing one for their chum Nora (Kat Denning), the other co-star, and then both sets of chums compared notes afterwards, they’d heave a collective “Duh!” or even a Homeric “Doh!,” tear up the questionnaires, and set up a blind date faster than the transmission of a text message.

They’re both good kids, low key, the farthest from frivolous and flamboyant imaginable. They’re both sincere, a friend in need, with a wonderfully droll sense of humor. They look fabulous together (hip, not chic), they share the same taste in music, and they roll with the punches, i.e., they not drama kings and queens. In short, they’re perfect for each other.

The only problem is, he’s getting over a tragic breakup from Tris (Alexis Dziena), a playuh, a black hole of attention, a manipulator, a floozie. She wrung him like a dishtowel and left him out to dry. A sensitive guy, he takes it hard. He’s already up to Break Up Playlist #12, each which Tris summarily dishes into the bin (Nora fishes one out and that’s when she realizes she might feel something for him more than pity). In the opening scene he leaves her a heart rendering but very adorable phone messages as he gazes with puppy dog eyes at his photographic shine to her on his bedroom wall. He wears his heart on his sleeve. “I love, therefore I suffer.”

She’s also getting over a sort-of break up, having sort-of dated a stringy dude, Tal (Jay Baruchel) for three years, that is, for her entire high school career. It’s messy, they sort of look good together (she hip, he chic), there are no boundaries (on again, off again; friends with privileges; he’s also using her, we later learn, to advance a fledgling career, for her father is a god in the music business).

It’s not love at first sight, well, it is, but, unlike him, she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She’s more of a brooder. Plus, they both have to plough through their baggage, which really is the theme of the movie, ploughing through emotional baggage to find true love, a bumpy road to love paralleled by a frantic city wide search for an announced-at-the-last second performance by their (and their generation’s) favorite band.

He has his posse, a riotous trio of dudes, Thom (Aaron Yoo), Dev (Rafi Gavron), and Lethario (Jonathan B. Wright), his fellow band members; he’s the only straight guy but he’s so level headed that it’s no big deal. She has her own, her best friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) who regularly gets plastered after promising not to, with hilarious results.

In structure it’s a Y Generation remake of American Graffiti, with an equally memorable soundtrack. It’s a movie worth re-watching (and listening to) on your iPod when it comes out, over and over again, because it takes the Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Ends Up With Girl story into the 21st century and makes us, who are older than them, think, well, heck yeah, The Kids Are Alright.

It’s a great romp set against the new music scene of one very cool New York night (at the end Caroline yells off the roof “I love New York,” and we should, too. Nothing mean about those streets) as Nick and Nora, droll, sensible, obviously as meant for each other as the other Nick and Nora, William Powell and Myrna Loy, connect, disconnect a few times, and then reconnect for good. The closing scene, a slow descent down an escalator in Pennsylvania Station, is a most excellent metaphor for a slow fall into love.