Nick O'Leary (Michael Cera, centre right) and Norah Silverberg (Kat Dennings) fall in love while searching for their favourite band in the alterna-romcom Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

It’s easy enough to fall in love with someone who makes you a mix CD. You swoon over the hand-drawn cover art, construct narratives from the sequencing of songs and pore over the lyrics of particular tracks, projecting a complete personality — if not an entire romance — onto a silvery slab of plastic.

Such is the case with Norah (Kat Dennings), a smarter-than-thou New York high school senior who masks her insecurities with a prickly shell. Yet for all her caustic comebacks, the straight-edge music geek can’t hide the fact that she’s crushed out on Nick (Michael Cera), the ex of her frenemy Tris (Alexis Dziena). After rescuing a cache of Nick’s lovelorn mix CDs — the spoils of Nick and Tris’s breakup — from the trash, Norah determines, never having even met the guy, that she and Nick are musical soulmates.

As for Nick, he’s the token straight member of a queercore band called the Jerk-Offs. Under his hipster uniform (American Apparel hoodie and skinny jeans), he is all nerves and feelings, and convinced he’ll win Tris back with the perfect combination of songs. His affable bandmates decide the only way to stop their bassist from making another volume of his patented “Road to Closure” mixes is to hook him up with a new girl.

Conveniently, the gods of indie rock intervene. One crazy night, while pursuing her favourite band, Where’s Fluffy — rumoured to be playing a secret show somewhere in New York — Norah turns up at a Jerk-Offs show. Hoping to get Tris off her case, Norah stages a make-out session with Nick, oblivious to the fact that he’s the Nick of mix CD fame.

Sparks fly, teenage drama ensues and Nick and Norah wind up in his battered Yugo, trying to find Where’s Fluffy, as well as track down Norah’s puking, stumbling waste-case BFF Caroline, who’s lost somewhere in the five boroughs. Along the journey, they’re waylaid by jerktastic exes (like slimy Tal, an opportunist who wants Norah’s mega-producer dad to hear his demo) and bad cellphone reception.

As premises go, it’s a flimsy one, even for a cute alternative rom-com. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist has one tight-panted leg in the zone of kids-gone-wild-in-the-underworld nail-biters like Go (1999), while the other one is planted in the generation-defining ethos of the John Hughes canon. But the stakes aren’t high enough to create much dramatic tension.

In his 2002 debut, Raising Victor Vargas, director Peter Sollett did a masterful job deconstructing the adolescent psyche, but here he doesn’t push very far beyond self-conscious dialogue and cultural ephemera. At times, Nick and Norah feels more like an extended episode of Degrassi or a zippy teen-geared novella than a developed feature.

Nick (Michael Cera, right) is the token straight man in queercore band The Jerk Offs in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. (Sony Pictures Entertainment)

And yet parts of the Playlist are curiously likeable. Nick and Norah circle around each other with the wariness of romantics who are all too accustomed to pining for jerks. Their bemusement is compounded by the realization that, though they may be musical soulmates, they have a long way to go before they actually know each other.

Nick and Norah’s is certainly no Juno — the writing here is frequently flat and stilted (“I refuse to be the goodie bag at your pity party, Nick,” Norah says at one point). While Nick and Norah arm themselves with defensive rejoinders, the screenplay’s biggest strength is the gradual dissolution of their protective armour. It’s hard not to squirm while Dennings and Cera fill space with their verbal false starts and awkward dad jokes. And yet there’s something about their tentative banter that feels more authentic than Juno.

Michael Cera does a serviceable job playing Michael Cera — that stunned charm may be wearing thin, but his stammering decent-dude persona suits the role. Dennings, however, really shines. Her Norah isn’t as skilled in the brittle sarcasm of Juno, and Dennings reveals just enough of her squishy, vulnerable core without coming off as a manic ball of neuroses.

Ultimately, though, the secret joy of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist lies in the in-joke nods toward the too-cool-for-school subculture it attempts to represent. At one point in the film, hippie folkie Devendra Banhart — looking stoned out of his gourd — wanders into a convenience store to deliver a one-liner about orgasms. Sad-sack Nick’s default mobile ringtone is Boys Don’t Cry by the Cure. And the reason we realize that Tris is totally wrong for Nick is not because she treats him like dirt, but because her favourite song is Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing — atrociously cheesy, and not even in an ironic way.

On a certain level, that nudge-nudge-wink-wink factor encapsulates what Nick and Norah’s world is all about: for all their sanctimonious judgment, these skinny-jeaned indie hipsters are really just itching to find someone who gets them.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist opens Oct. 3.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.