For Use on Friday Evenings

Some films function less as art and more as delivery mechanisms—something you put on when you want the evening to drift in a particular direction without having to explicitly propose it. Cruel Intentions, Romeo & Juliet, Amélie—that shelf. You know exactly what you’re doing when you reach for it, and so does everyone watching, and the agreement is that nobody says so. Of the three, Amélie is the one I sometimes feel too attached to to use as a prop. It deserves better than that.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is gunning for a spot on that shelf, and having seen a preview, I think it might earn one. Nick is the kind of lovable wreck who stays in contact with an ex by making her elaborate mixtapes she doesn’t care about—because her friend Norah does, obsessively, and that’s how they end up colliding, unknowingly, at a gig one night in New York. What follows is a single night in the city: bands, bars, bad decisions, and the slow accumulation of a feeling neither of them has a word for yet.

The music is the real surprise. The indie soundtrack is genuinely good—not curated-for-the-trailer good, but the kind of thing you actually look up afterward. The film captures something specific about being in your twenties in a city at 2 AM, moving from place to place on a charged uncertainty you can’t quite name. It’s not a great film. But it’s a useful one, and even if the evening doesn’t go the way you’d hoped, you’ve still got the songs. There are worse outcomes.