All this talk of "rising stars" and "the new Hollywood" has to mean something, right? It seems like Michael Cera and Kat Dennings are running at the head of that pack; Cera swept the floor in 2007 with the one-two punch of "Superbad" and "Juno," and Dennings wasn't far behind with "Charlie Bartlett" and "The House Bunny," with the latter coming out this year.

It's easy for us college students to fall in line with their work; they really do represent something "new," for lack of a better term, surpassing the sophomoric staples of the preceding generation (think "American Pie" and "Dude, Where's My Car?") by portraying more believable caricatures of themselves and their audience. "American Pie" came out nearly 10 years ago. Don't kid yourself, either: you weren't really old enough to know exactly what "MILF" stood for until you asked a friend with an older brother. The sons of that movie were too old to relate to and too young to believe. Now that we've collectively reached the double-decade mark, those movie characters are actually portraying us, because we're the same age as the actors. And thank goodness we've got Cera and Dennings on our team instead of Jason Biggs and Tara Reid. We've got a little class.

"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" gets many things right about our generation. We drink. We make bad decisions. We make mix CDs that few people appreciate. We think food at 4 a.m. tastes better than food at midnight. We like loud bands. We drive shitty cars. We're not sure how to handle meeting new people. We're not sure how to handle revisiting old relationships. Nick (Cera) and Norah (Dennings) have conversations that feel and look familiar, and their relationship itself develops quite realistically, albeit quickly, considering the one-night context of the film.

Their quest to find uber-awesome indie band Where's Fluffy?-whose ever-changing mystery venue schtick actually sounds like it would make for an extremely fun way to spend a Friday night-in the depths of gritty New York under-21 nightlife reveals quite a bit about the college-age psyche. Nick is so uncomfortably hung up on waify Triss (Alexis Dziena), who can be described perfectly by the most obvious adjective that rhymes with her name, that he hits close enough to home to demonstrate just how futile it is and how ridiculous it looks to pine over an ex. Norah's got her own set of problems: In one corner, she's burdened with taking care of Caroline (Ari Graynor), an ever-imbibed party-girl friend who always ditches her for the bar; in the other corner, she's lured by the comfort-and not much else-of a friend-with-benefits sleazebag. Fate would have it that Nick and Norah speak up about the other's problems, and what starts as banter and bickering leads to understanding and trust between two relative strangers.

While "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" shows beautifully, with quick urban shots and a shadowy, indie-movie feel, the film's fault is in its humor. It straddles the border between the aforementioned bathroom-humor-driven teen movies of generations past and the artsy inspiration of Zach Braff's mini-oeuvre. The writers of "Nick and Norah" selected a particularly disgusting quasi-MacGuffin-ABC gum-whose vomit-soaked path detracts from the script's cleverness and establishes the movie's presence on the gross-out humor bandwagon.

Of course, maybe it's not the movie that double-dips in the two eras. Maybe it's us. The college years are "formative" after all. We've got the heady stuff to worry about-school, work, relationships-and at the end of the day, it's nice to throw in a fart joke.