Back in 1996, Greg Mottola wrote and directed an excellent, low-key indie comedy called The Daytrippers, starring Hope Davis, Liev Schrieber, Campbell Scott, Parker Posey, Stanley Tucci--basically, your all-star indie cast, circa 1996. It got great reviews and did just well enough commercially to consign Motttola to the ranks of directors working in TV, where he gained a toehold on what would become the Judd Apatow Comedy Juggernaut by directing several episodes of the short-lived, Apatow-created series Undeclared. In a roundabout way, this would lead to his getting to direct Superbad, the monster hit written by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, with Apatow on board as a producer. Next week sees the release of the third film he has directed and the second he has made from his own script, Adventureland, a coming-of-age comedy, set in 1987, about a fresh college graduate (played by Jesse Eisenberg) spending his summer working at a Pittsburgh amusement park and falling in love with a co-worker, played by Twilight's Kristen Stewart. Given the youthful characters, the noisy, hormonal atmosphere, and the presence in the cast of such SNL stalwarts as Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig--not to mention that bad banner on the ads reading "from the director of Superbad"--audiences who wouldn't know The Daytrippers from the Night Stalker might very well show up expecting Superbad II, a possible misunderstanding that the studio might have little interest in discouraging.

Writing in The New York Times, Larry Rohter notes that in Superbad, the director "telegraphed his intentions before even a single line of dialogue had been uttered. With a title taken from a James Brown song and a soundtrack that leaned heavily on funk hits from the 1970s, the contrast with the movie’s three main characters, suburban white boys as nerdy and insecure as they were randy, could hardly have been more pronounced." In Adventureland, "Once again he uses music to signal what is to come, but this time he kicks things off with the Replacements and the Velvet Underground." As Mottola explains, “I had to indicate to the audience this may not be what you are expecting." The new movie is autobiographical, its tone more bittersweet than brassy. Rauch writes that some of Mottola's "most enduring memories of that time stem from the exasperation he felt hearing the same songs played over and over on loudspeakers at the park, and the exhilaration he felt tuning in to college radio when he and his friends were off duty." This actually helped him to forge a useful bond with his music supervisor, Tracy McKnight, who also worked at an amusement park around the same time and can out of the experience with "Eddie Money embedded in my head." In the process of piecing together what McKnight calls "the soundtrack to our own life stories,” she had to obtain clearances for almost forty songs, and with comparatively limited resources: Superbad, for instance, used one Van Halen's "Panama", which, Mottola says, “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.”

Although the soundtrack did wind up featuring some '80s clurter as Poison, "Rock Me Amadeus", and some Rush (thanks to a character whose enthusiasm for the band may be seen as an accidental but timely homage to I Love You, Man), it does include such timeless alt-rock favorites as New York Dolls, Big Star, the Cure, and Husker Du, whose music plays a special role in the budding romance at the picture's center. (“It’s shorthand in the script,” says Mottola. “Kristen’s character is already interesting to Jesse, but he falls for her when she plays Hüsker Dü on the tape player in her car.” Just reading that, some of are relating so hard that our heads hurt.) The movie has an actual behind-the-scenes link to that world via its original score, which was produced by the band Yo La Tengo, whose members, led by co-founder Ira Kaplan, have a mutual admiration thing going on with Mottola. It's not Yo La Tengo's first time as film composers; their most recent record, They Shoot, we Score, consisted of music they originally wrote for the films Old Joy, Game 6, Junebug, and Shortbus, and last year they scored The Toe Tactic, which was directed by Emily Hubley, whose sister, Georgia, is in the band. (She's also married to Kaplan.) “I’m down on songs that literally describe the action on the screen, because that’s unimaginative,” Kaplan says, by way of explaining their approach to soundtrack work. Instead, “sometimes the music is ahead of the movie by a beat, or behind by a beat.”