From its animated notebook-scrawl opening credits to a final scene in which two people finally, effortlessly unburden themselves of a MacGuffin and just decide to be together, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (based on the young adult novel by Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan) seems to have been packaged in the hopes that the lightning that made Juno an unignorable commodity a cultural phenomena will strike twice. Nick and Norah isn’t quite the assault to the teen romance genre that Juno was, and that’s both good and bad. Michael Cera’s Nick, Kat Denning’s Norah, and their assorted pals drift fluidly between irony-as-defense and taking both themselves, and the idea of love, very seriously. The result is a film that’s much more of a traditional teen romance, but also a more honest one.
