Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

The year is 2008. A young man named Nick plays bass in a queercore band despite being, as the production notes cheerfully establish, the straight one. He spends a single night in Manhattan chasing a secret concert and a girl, and the film that results is a modest, agreeable thing, the kind of picture that arrives, pleases, and departs without leaving a mark on the culture. It grossed three times its budget. Everyone went home satisfied.

Where the film shows genuine cultural awareness is in its treatment of its gay characters. Nick's bandmates are gay, the drag queens at the cabaret are simply present, and the screenplay never pauses to congratulate itself for any of it. The material is handled with a shrug, which is the correct posture, and the GLAAD nomination that followed was earned. Norah, for her part, is allowed to pursue Nick directly and to walk away from a man who wants her only for her father's industry connections. That is a spine, not a thesis. The cast is otherwise white to a fault, with Aaron Yoo and a few cameo players providing the only variation, and the film has nothing at all to say about race.

It also declines to lecture. There is no environmental sermon, no economic indictment of the music business, no discourse on bodies or brains, no revision of any history. Tal's opportunism is a plot device, not a critique of late capitalism. The whole enterprise amounts to a sweet, slight romance with a good soundtrack and a genuinely progressive ease about sexuality. We have seen worse. We have also seen the film's betters, but we are not here to rank them. We are here to file.