Who says boys don't cry in (500) Days of Summer?

Summer loving: Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the dumped boyfriend to Zooey Deschanel’s heartbreaker

There is a scene, somewhere near the start of video director Marc Webb’s first feature, where Summer, the object of desire, dumps Tom, her feckless suitor, while comparing their relationship to that of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

"Sid stabbed Nancy seven times with a kitchen knife," Tom complains. "We have disagreements, but I hardly think I’m Sid Vicious."

"No," Summer replies, "I’m Sid."

Seasoned observers of independent American cinema will spot several clues to this film’s genre in that little exchange. The pop culture references distinguish it from average Hollywood fare, and the punchline of the joke suggests that some kind of sexual role reversal has taken place. The film is written by two men — Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber — and is a dry, unsentimental look at love in which the hero, Tom, is a Morrissey-loving milksop whose attitude to relationships was damaged by his fatal misunderstanding of The Graduate. In other words, with apologies to the late Ms Spungen, this is a romcom for Nancy boys.

That, by the way, is not to disparage it. In a world where Judd "40 Year Old Virgin" Apatow can be confused with an auteur, any softening of the conventional wisdom which assumes that men like smut while women love hearts and shoes (but mostly shoes) is to be welcomed. There is only one Apatow-like moment here, a wordplay on the word "anal", but even that is almost innocent. ("I was very neat," Summer explains, after Tom’s gasp of shock). And there are moments of emotional recognition that go beyond the Nick Hornby-ish cultural shorthand. The bit where, after an evening of karaoke, Tom takes a very long time to not kiss Summer is quite heartbreaking. And the scene where the two lovers display their mutual fascination by agreeing to shout the word "penis" in a public place is authentically embarrassing: it’s not that you like the characters for doing it — quite the reverse — but it does manage to capture the illogical dizziness of the freshly lovesick.

Summer, you may have gleaned, is a girl, played with dreamy insouciance by Zooey Deschanel. She has big eyes, dark hair, size eight shoes, a fondness for tight tops, and a heart-shaped birthmark. She likes Magritte and Hopper. She thinks Ringo is the best Beatle. (Attentive boys will now be aware that the girl has flaws.)

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who resembles a fresh-faced Mark Wahlberg), meanwhile, isn’t so much a geek as an indie everyman. He wears a Joy Division T-shirt and enjoys existential French movies where everyone is miserable. He’s not a nerd — he has the indie kid’s inbuilt sense of cultural superiority to sustain him — but his self-loathing does extend to knowing that his job, writing the messages for greetings cards, is inappropriate for a man of his taste and erudition. (It also allows the script to have some well-aimed fun at prefabricated sentiment.)

So, while Tom can appreciate the loveliness of Summer, he doesn’t believe, at heart, that he deserves her affection. She, meanwhile, informs him from the start that she is not interested in a serious relationship; she is young and just wants to have fun. "Holy shit," Tom’s friend Mackenzie exclaims on hearing this, "you’re a dude!"

The arc of their ill-starred affair is conventional but is made to seem less so by the film’s structure, which relays scenes from their 500-day friendship out of order. This randomness may be an attempt to replicate the confused state of mind of the freshly jilted Tom as he looks for clues to his romantic failure but it also keeps things fresh. It’s worth bearing in mind that the action is rendered from Tom’s perspective, so it runs from idealised adoration to a post-coital dance sequence, punctuated by crushing disappointment. Slightly annoyingly, the film also employs a narrator (Richard McGonagle, impersonating Morgan Freeman) as if to underline the fact that Tom is reworking his experience into a palatable myth.

Comparisons with Woody Allen are misplaced — the lines don’t punch the way Woody’s used to — but the cinematography does a good job of making unfashionable corners of Los Angeles look like Allen’s Manhattan. The same could be said of Alex Holdridge’s 2008 film, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, another smart comedy which explored the radical idea that men might have emotions.
Andrew O’Hagan is away.

(500) Days Of Summer
Cert: 12A

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