IN the previous movie he directed, the 2007 hit teenage sex comedy “Superbad,” Greg Mottola 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.
Mr. Mottola’s new film, which he wrote as well as directed, is called “Adventureland,” and while it is another coming-of-age comedy, its tone is bittersweet, not raunchy or farcical. 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.
After the startling commercial and critical success of “Superbad,” which earned more than $170 million at the box office, Mr. Mottola said he felt some Hollywood pressure to turn “Adventureland” into “Superbad II.”
“I had to indicate to the audience this may not be what you are expecting,” he explained during an interview this month, and the “Adventureland” soundtrack offered him the quickest, most efficient way to do that.
The movie, which opens on April 3, is a reflective period piece, set in a run-down Pittsburgh amusement park in the summer of 1987. It features Jesse Eisenberg, best known for his role as the troubled older son in “The Squid and The Whale,” and Kristen Stewart, who played Bella Swan in “Twilight,” as a pair of mopey game-booth workers hesitantly drawn to each other as they emerge from adolescence into adulthood.
On Sunday the Museum of the Moving Image will hold a retrospective of Mr. Mottola’s work, which will include a preview of “Adventureland”; showings of “Superbad” and his 1997 debut, “The Daytrippers”; and a question-and-answer session with the director.
“Adventureland” is based in part on Mr. Mottola’s own experiences working one summer at an amusement park of that name in Farmingdale, N.Y., on Long Island, near where he grew up. Some of his 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.
“I always wanted for this movie to have some of the flavor of a pop song, but without being overly sentimental or nostalgic for its own sake,” Mr. Mottola, who is 44, said. “How else do I give words to what it felt like growing up in the suburbs feeling largely misunderstood?”
It turned out that Tracy McKnight, the movie’s music supervisor, also worked at an amusement park, in Seaside Heights, N.J., in the 1980s. “I had Eddie Money embedded in my head” as a result, she said, along with Meat Loaf, Tommy Tutone and other masters of pop bombast. So as she and Mr. Mottola exchanged mixtapes and iPod playlists, they found it easy to agree on what styles of music the movie needed to include. “We were creating the soundtrack to our own life stories,” she said.
Ms. McKnight has worked on roughly 100 movies in her career, for John Waters and Edward Burns and for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony on “El Cantante,” among others. She said she is usually called on to negotiate the rights to use between 15 and 20 songs. “Adventureland,” in contrast, required her to obtain clearances for nearly 40, and with relatively modest resources.
“We weren’t exactly working with a ‘Batman’ budget,” Mr. Mottola said dryly. Or even “Superbad” for that matter. The rights to Van Halen’s “Panama,” featured in “Superbad,” “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in ‘Adventureland,’ ” he said.
Even with those financial constraints, music by some of the most emblematic artists of the era is included in the film, from cult bands like the Cure, Hüsker Dü, the New York Dolls and Big Star to big names like the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Lou Reed. But in keeping with the true spirit of those times, the glam-metal band Poison and Falco’s lamentably unforgettable “Rock Me Amadeus” are also present, as are a Foreigner cover band and a park employee whose obsession with Rush recalls Jack Black at his most hyper.
Mr. Mottola acknowledged that he is “telling a familiar story” of first love found and apparently lost, and that he is working with “characters who are archetypes.” That helps to explain why and how he uses so much music to define his characters.
“It’s shorthand in the script,” he said. “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.”
The movie’s pensive tone is maintained in its score, which was written by another group whose origins date to the ’80s: the indie favorites Yo La Tengo. Since 2001 this Hoboken trio has branched out to write music for six films, a sampling of which was released last year on a CD called “They Shoot, We Score.” The group’s members admired “The Daytrippers” and already knew Mr. Mottola, who is a fan of the band, and found that their notion of how music is best used in films meshed with his.
“I’m down on songs that literally describe the action on the screen, because that’s unimaginative,” said Ira Kaplan, who founded Yo La Tengo with his wife, Georgia Hubley. As a result, he said, in “Adventureland” “sometimes the music is ahead of the movie by a beat, or behind by a beat.”
One example Mr. Kaplan cited is a scene in which Ms. Stewart’s character has a bitter confrontation with her stepmother, played by Wendie Malick. “Our mission was not to express anger, because she was already doing that,” he said. “We wanted to bring out the sadness and confusion that result in her lashing out.”
Nowadays, Mr. Mottola listens more to jazz than to pop music, he said. But he remains nostalgic for the time portrayed in “Adventureland,” when “my perspective was naïve and romantic and probably childish, but sincere,” and the songs he heard on college radio seemed the ideal vehicle for those feelings.
“I’m still a sucker for that,” he said, and so “Adventureland” is his affectionate tribute to “the pop music that saved my life.”
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