Michael Cera, left, Ari Graynor, center, and Kat Dennings star in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

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In the oddly titled Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Nick plays in a band and has been mending a broken heart for a month after Tris, his girlfriend, dumped him.

Norah is something of a wallflower who is absorbed in music. She knows Nick only by reputation. She grooves on the CD music mixes he has made for Tris, picking them out of the trash at their New Jersey high school after Tris discards them.

Tossed together by fate at a club where his band is playing, Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings) discover they both adore the band Where’s Fluffy? and set out on an odyssey across New York City to find the place where the band is supposed to play a secret gig in the early morning hours.

What follows is a daffy, original, hip, crowd-pleasing and clever romantic comedy that speaks to the uncertainties of love and the messiness that it sometimes entails.

Along the way to finding which way their hearts will finally lead them, Nick and Norah run across a Wonderland of oddball characters and even odder situations. What can you say about a movie whose running gag revolves around a wad of much-chewed chewing gum? You have to love the sheer nutty innocence of it all, just like Nick’s two endearing gay bandmates — plus another guy that one of them has picked up along the way — who act like a trio of fairy godmothers in encouraging Nick and Norah’s romance while dissing the temptress Tris, who begins trailing Nick in a fit of jealous rage.

Some of the magical ingredients in Lorene Scafaria’s funny screenplay, based on a book by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, are Nick’s orange Yugo, Norah’s perpetually inebriated gal pal Caroline (a very funny Ari Graynor), the ladies room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a turkey sandwich, an ice cream freezer at a Korean deli, a drag queen Christmas revue and, of course, that wad of much-chewed gum.

It’s an offbeat eclectic mix, yet under the direction of Peter Sollett the ingredients make for zany collisions in a film that moves very fast and is propelled by very clever lines

Cera makes the most of the very tentative delivery he has used so well before in Superbad and Juno. In the film’s opening scene, Nick leaves a pathetic message on Tris’s answering machine, trying not to sound nervous or pleading, although it comes across just that way. Cera’s low-key, uncertain delivery, underscored by a feeling of anxiety, is perfect for Nick. As the film goes along, he finds himself drawn to Norah, with whom he shares many interests, while still being attracted to Tris (Alexis Dziena), who has the instincts of a bloodhound and the heart of a panther as she tracks Nick and Norah across New York.

Nick and Norah have two quests, in fact. Not only do they want to find Where’s Fluffy?, deciphering clues to the whereabouts of the secret gig that are left on nightclub walls. Norah is also eager to find Caroline, who has run away from Nick’s three gay friends whom she believes in her drunken state were kidnappers. Caroline has disappeared somewhere into the night.

Her own sodden journey leads to an amusing encounter on a park bench involving that turkey sandwich, soon followed by a hilarious funny-awful scene whose prime components are a cell phone, that wad of gum and a toilet full of vomit. The scene is played by Sollett for maximum laughs … and squeamish groans.

Along Nick and Norah’s very strange journey through nighttime New York, passersby keep trying to get into his orange Yugo, believing it’s a taxi. In one funny encounter, a couple in the midst of lusty passion hop into the back seat.

Will Nick and Norah, played by Dennings as a feet-on-the-ground but slightly mysterious young woman who is much more laid back and aware than Nick, find Where’s Fluffy? Will they save Caroline from an encounter with a cigarette-smoking Jesus? Will the Yugo survive Norah’s demolition-derby driving skills?

In a film as wonderfully wacky and cheerfully romantic as Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the answers to those questions are part of the fun.

*****Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Starring: Michael Cera, Kat Dennings, Ari Graynor, Alexis Dziena.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com