Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” John Cusack says in “High Fidelity.” This advice could be the mantra of the new movie “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” in which the two eponymous star-crossed lovers are united by their worship of indie music—in particular the fictional group Where’s Fluffy. But for all its pretensions to understanding indie music fans, the movie comes across as contrived and unemotional.

Nick, played by Michael Cera of “Juno” and “Superbad” fame, is devastated after his girlfriend Tris (Alexis Dziena) breaks up with him. Being the generic emo-punk that he is, he makes her dozens of mix CDs with heart-rending titles such as—in one of the film’s best and most subtle jokes—“Road to Closure, Volume 12.” One of Tris’s best friends, Norah (Kat Dennings), has fallen in love with Nick’s mix CDs, despite never having met their maker. While attending a show by Nick’s band, The Jerk Offs, Norah, feeling lonely, grabs the nearest guy and tells Tris it’s her boyfriend (even though, as we later discover, she already has one). As chance would have it, that guy is Nick, and their relationship springs from there as they attempt to track down the secret show put on that night in New York by Where’s Fluffy.

In many ways, this is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Cera. He is his normal self, relying on smiles and awkward movements to convey emotion. People who fell in love with him in “Juno” will be satisfied again, but there is no way he can carry this movie. His cute boy-next-door charm is effective when coupled with a strong partner, be it Ellen Page in “Juno” or the entire cast of “Arrested Development,” but here all he gets is Dennings’ anemic portrayal of Norah. While her character is very poorly developed, one would have hoped Dennings might have injected at least some life into the rich-girl-trying-to-be-normal stereotype.

In fact, director Peter Sollett leaves pretty much all of his characters flat and uninteresting. Tris is a vacuous hottie who only wants Nick when he doesn’t want her. Norah’s friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) is a drunken mess whose antics provide many of the film’s jokes—a gratuitous attempt at gross-out humor that sits bizarrely with the film’s kitschy romantic storyline. Nick’s bandmates, who are all gay, are possibly the most offensive of the bunch, obsessing over appearances and failing to display any emotional depth.

For a film so concerned with what its characters like, it boggles the mind that Nick and Norah choose such awful friends. But it makes sense given how inconsistent their personalities are. Norah is desperate not to be seen as the spoiled daughter of a famous music-producer father, but she is happy to use this position to skip the line at a club. There is also no explanation as to why a band as supposedly great as Where’s Fluffy would only perform a gig at 6 a.m. and refuse to tell its loyal fans where to show up.

“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is clearly aiming to tap into some kind of indie-music zeitgeist. The two main characters have one particularly nauseating conversation where they attempt to one-up each other’s love for Where’s Fluffy—as if them both being among the first people to get hold of one of the group’s albums makes them soulmates. This and other scenes reveal what they—and their movie—really are: posers. It’s not what you like that matters, but whether you have enough emotional substance to be interesting.

—Staff writer Chris R. Kingston can be reaches at kingston@fas.harvard.edu.