Growing up in Scranton, I’ve lived my entire life in the shadow of New York City. It’s just two hours north on a good day. I don’t go often enough that I can still admit that there are moments where NYC has a bit of a fantasy air about it, but it’s close enough that I have ready access to it, and so it has this kind of liminal property to it: it’s familiar, there are people I know, places that I haunt, but there are still new things for me to find and still moments that evoke the childlike glee I’d have when looking out onto the city from the Empire State Building’s observation deck or sitting in Yankee Stadium (this was back before the Yankees drove me away from baseball in that unique way that old traitorous lovers have of ruining great things for you) or the first show I saw on Broadway (Phantom of the Opera), or the skyline from the ferry – a sight that still manages to captivate me and is probably the intellectually honest reason why I always opt to take the ferry into Manhattan.
Not that I’m naive about the charm of NYC. It’s imperfect, but any self-respecting object d’amour has to be deeply flawed. And, after decades of circling the outer orbits of the city, I do love it. Even if I occasionally have to share a cab with a drunk who’s searching manically for his lost cell phone.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a movie about New York City, not just one that takes place in it. It evokes the ill-planned night trips to the city that I’d occasionally take with my friends in college, mixtapes blaring on the car stereo and conversations about girls filling up the time between Wilkes-Barre and NYC.
When I told my friend Rich (of Film Buff Online fame) that I’d not seen Nick and Nora yet, and he told me he loved it and waxed poetic about the exact same things. “We are driving east and the sun is going down,” he’d say as his own gang of friends left Kutztown, “and we won’t be driving west until the sun is coming up.” I may be paraphrasing here, Rich, but I think I got it. I decided to watch the movie last night. I popped the DVD in at midnight, half expecting to fall asleep. When the movie finished, I was more awake than I was when it started.
My feelings about the movie are so inextricably tied to its subject matter, that I don’t think I can even review it. It’s a movie about young, music-loving outcasts trying to connect with one another on one of those impulsive New York trips; if that’s something you’ve ever been or done, this is a movie you will fall in love with and I can’t recommend it enough. If that isn’t you, or if you hate the city, you might think it’s cute at best, and I feel sad for you.
