Take a generally annoyed twenty-something out to a movie (please), and they and I might remark that the trajectory of the average romance picture (meet, court, nuptials, cue curtain) is, very annoyingly, the opposite of the average romance (meet, court, long silences, suspicions of infidelity, depression, actual infidelity, tense stand-offs in the kitchen, hysterical laughter, and finally mutual firings and total lack of family support). 500 Days of Summer takes an interesting stab at weaving those arcs into a double helix: it uses the dishonesty, distrust, and ultimate disappointment of a real relationship, then shuffles around the timeline so that we can end with a little bliss and contentment. Scared, uncertain couples who watch this film attentively will have an irrevocable wedge hammered between them in minutes, approximately the lethality of a Test Your Strength machine in a high foot-traffic area.

Because the rules of modern love films sternly dictate that both leads hold peculiar jobs and/or interests that will eventually unite them via a heap of silly explanations, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a frustrated architect who works as a writer of holiday greeting cards.  During a meeting, one of his co-workers suggested using my birthday to celebrate successful lesbian relationships, which I think is appropriate and am only too happy to sign off on.  Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is described by the film as possessing a “power” over the universe. She can, for example, dramatically increase the sales of Belle & Sebastian simply by quoting their lyrics in her yearbook. This is not altogether inexplicable — I left the film with a strong urge to place her on my coffee table like a precious book, letting dinner guests flip through her hair with jealousy. And so Tom sets about winning her affections over the course of the titular 500 days, which the movie flits through breezily and without regard to chronology.

The film has two terrific setpieces, simple and forlornly realistic, in a whirling trip to IKEA and an emotionally tragic dinner party. These are plainly two of the best scenes ever photographed in a romance film. The film attempts several other showstoppers with a musical number which looks criminally underfunded, and a “big speech” in which Tom quits his job after eating several packets of Twinkies, which might mean that Dan White’s lawyers were onto something.

The film uses its temporal freedom to indulge quite a bit in playful pastiche – when Tom nods off in a movie theater, he briefly imagines himself as a character in The Seventh Seal, and there is also an odd segment wherein secondary characters talk to the director as though it were all a documentary, probably culled from When Harry Met Sally or Reds. Few of these excursions (including explicit nods to seminal love film The Graduate) add anything to the story.

There is a strange trend in pop culture love films of this generation that they are all about people falling in love through pop culture. Think of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008), where enjoying the same bands was their starry-eyed revelation, or Juno (2007) where it was alt-rock music again, actually, although The Blair Witch Project and tic-tacs were mentioned briefly. Here, Tom’s love is awakened only when he realizes that she shares his love of The Smiths; his visit to the local karaoke bar produces renditions of The Pixies’ “Here Comes Your Man” and “Train In Vain” by The Clash (incidentally, where is this bar? The hippest track I’ve ever seen performed in a karaoke joint was a version of “Anarchy In The U.K.” that was recorded on Casio and didgeridoo in some South Korean basement). He also spends most of the film wearing T-shirts of album covers so conspicuously chosen for their inability to be criticized (London Calling, Doolittle, et. al.) that no other character, equally conspicuously, ever takes note of them.

Trying to attract her attentions a second time, Tom turns up the volume on a Smiths song as she walks past, which is a sad and particular kind of courtship that puts all of the pressure on the other party. Practitioners of this art can be spotted on your local bus line, reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” day after day, hoping the perfect woman will strike up a conversation about it. This type of signaling rarely hears a response, though it is uniquely weird and morose to observe – strangers who propose to each other at motorcycle rallies, or Star Trek conventions, and interpret those moments as a perfect confluence of all of their hopes and dreams is a gloomy prospect indeed. (For my own mating calls, I use an exceedingly worn copy of “Booby Traps & Improvised Anti-Personnel Devices.”)

This is the central problem.  Tom, the film’s hero, the person the film is supposed to identify with most strongly, is really a kind of pure-breed terrified loner, which is a fact that Summer has to continually dance around in order to include in the film the full number of situations required for a feature production. One of the most compelling aspects of Brick (also with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so, easy comparison) was that, by subsuming itself within pop culture completely, by giving its characters iconic types to slip into and stretch in odd directions, it brushed away some strange, firm cobweb in the rafters and let its high-school characters relate to each other more directly than in any other teen film this decade – which is the sort of thing that can keep one up at night. Also the movie’s is totally awesome, but you already knew that.

Tom has a lot of supportive friends who attempt to guide him through the film, including a girl of 11 with dialog that sounds meant for a woman three times her age, and who is probably 11 only to avoid any concerns that the film is headed for one of those endings where the two best friends discover they were in love all along – but Summer herself remains friendless and largely a mystery. She is the dream girl of all the sad-sack romantics like Tom: a girl who’ll plant one on a guy just for listening to her favorite album, and thereafter be perfectly his. The fact that this is a bit loopy cunningly escapes most of the characters, though the young girl muses to Tom that “you were crazy to think it was all destiny just because you like the same dumb stuff.” That’s a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, and the film duly backs away from it with an ending that confirms all of the silly superstitions it had seemed to be deliberately picking apart.

But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if ten or twenty years from now, this film is still quite popular, and seen as emblematic of this particular time and place – with the rise of social networking, likes and dislikes are the only indicators we have to sort through people, and it makes relationships long, painful, intensely flawed, and tough to get off the ground. But we’ll only remember the good parts.

Anyway, you’re all still invited to my next birthday party down at “Cattyshack,” where I’ll be performing renditions of “Pink Triangle” and “All the Things She Said” done entirely on synthesizer. Bring lesbians.

4 out of 5 stars

Q: What’s the best book to be seen reading if you want to attract the perfect woman?

A: Try to be reading something intellectual, girls love a smart man. Try “A Brief History of Time.”