I spent too much time pondering whether the people behind Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist were alluding in their title to novelist Dashiell Hammett’s once-famous, upper-crust, deliver-may-care detective husband and wittily supportive wife. Eventually, I stopped caring and tried to focus on this movie. This effort took less time; Peter Sollett’s movie has been described in the press as “an indie variation on a John Hughes movie.” That is, it’s supposed to be a sweetly contemporary, very mildly tart and ironic but adolescent-flattering romantic comedy.

John Hughes himself seems to have decided long ago that neither the film industry nor American audiences needed any more such efforts from him. I suppose that doesn’t mean someone else can’t try his or her hand at this kind of thing.

Four or five years back, Sollett made a real “indie” film, Raising Victor Vargas, a sometimes sweet and sympathetic but often sharply observed little movie about the dim but perhaps growing perception of a Hispanic teenager in Brooklyn that romantic and family entanglements may bring unforeseen responsibilities. It’s a far cry from this movie, which has a rising new star, Michael Cera (Juno), and what seems to an at least modestly substantial budget. It’s about two ostensibly mismatched 17-year-olds (Cera and Kat Denning) who come together for an impromptu night-long odyssey across some of lower Manhattan’s groovier precincts (I’m trying to separate myself from this movie by the use of that antiquated adjective) in search of a friend, and wind up in loveland.

It’s not without some verbal facility, and Cera is practiced at doing a kind of nebbishy, smartly self-aware misfit, but the movie has a mechanical, a-little-bit-of-this-and-some-of-that feel. It seems aimed at a kind of smart, sensitive but culturally integrated adolescent who’s as interested in that playlist as she is in Senator Obama’s campaign. That’s who should probably have reviewed it, but, dear reader, you’re stuck with me.

—george sax