The mix tape is not dead. The yearning, angst, love and hope embodied in the tapes of the ’80s and ’90s have merely evolved into a new medium. In Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Nick (Michael Cera) funnels all his energy into mixes he creates that include bands such as Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, We Are Scientists, The Submarines, Rogue Wave and the Shout Out Louds.

The movie attempts to interweave these elements into a Superbad-like trip around New York City that entertains but does not quite live up to its daring title. There’s nothing really infinite or even insightful about the movie’s musical references. Nonetheless, Cera hasn’t changed a bit and succeeds with his trademark nuanced humor.

At the preppy, all-girls Sacred Heart School, a girl gives Tris, Nick’s ex-girlfriend, the latest breakup mix. Thoroughly over Nick, she hurls the CD, complete with Nick’s hand-drawn album artwork, into the trash. Norah (Kat Dennings) feels her heart jump. She knows Nick only through the playlists she’s unearthed from the garbage, and like all the others, she retrieves this one from the trash to add to her iPod.

Nick finds himself still helplessly (almost annoyingly) in love with the beautiful Tris, even though they’ve been broken up for weeks. Norah has an on-again, off-again “friend with benefits” who uses her for her quasi-celebrity status as the daughter of a recording mogul. The movie brings up her wealth and dad’s celebrity status too many times, and the rehashing really spoils what it’s trying to do: to connect Norah to something music-related. Both, whether they feel it or not, are ready to move on.

The Jerks-Offs, a band composed of Nick and two gay friends, rock out at a gig with both Tris and Norah in attendance, but Nick can’t get Tris off his mind, and he’s never even met Norah, the girl who already knows him through his playlists. Predictably, Nick and Norah meet at the gig after she uses the classic “pretend-you’re-my-boyfriend-and-kiss-me” routine.

The unpredictable part is a little better, though: Norah has no idea the guy she’s kissing is the same guy from the CDs. She goes up to Nick, and sparks fly.

Nick, playing the same subdued, funny, nice guy he did in Juno and Superbad, offers to help Norah take her drunken friend Caroline (Ari Graynor) home. They get in Nick’s beat-up yellow Yugo, but it fitfully fails to start. The Yugo really does a better job developing itself as a thematic element in the movie than the music does. Countless jokes about this funny-looking car stick more with the audience than any one band Nick and Norah supposedly share in their “infinite playlist.” Nick’s bandmates and some random guy they picked up decide to take poor Caroline home and allow Nick and Norah a little alone time.

The first few jokes about the gay band elicit some good-natured laughter. But as they argue about renaming their band something “gayer,” the movie crosses a line between humor and caricature. Drunken Tris, sick of the band, calls them a fistful of assholes. Her outburst works so well, it becomes, depressingly, their best pick.

Meanwhile, Nick and Norah drive around in the cozily small Yugo. At one point, a drunken couple in the middle of a very private act forces itself into the car thinking it a cab. All the while, Nick and Norah listen to some of his mix CDs, talk about college and the future, and argue a bit about Nick’s infatuation with Tris. Nick and Norah’s discussion of the music, though, comes off far too shallow for the supposed passion each have for it.
Across town, the gay guys lose Caroline while getting hot dogs from Gray’s Papaya.

The movie goes a little too far from gross to repulsive when the audience experiences Caroline’s vomiting as if they are the target.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist delivers for those wanting the usual guy-gets-the-girl comedy. However, those excited by the title, expecting to be dazzled by the alternative music motif, leave disappointedly wanting something more developed.