Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel star in Fox Searchlight’s “500 Days of Summer” which makes its Sedona premiere on Tuesday, June 9, as part of the Sedona International Film Festival’s Second Tuesday Cinema Series.

The fuse is lit on Day 1 – when Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a would-be architect turned sappy greeting card writer encounters Summer (), his boss’s breezy, beautiful new secretary fresh off the plane from Michigan.  Though seemingly out of his league, Tom soon discovers he shares plenty in common with Summer.

By Day 31, things are moving ahead, albeit “casually.”  By Day 32, Tom is irreparably smitten living in a giddy, fantastical world of Summer on his mind.  By Day 185, things are in serious limbo — but not without hope.  And as the story winds backwards and forwards through Tom and Summer’s on-again, off-again, sometimes blissful, often tumultuous dalliance it covers the whole dizzying territory from infatuation, dating, and sex to separation, recrimination and redemption in a whirl of time jumps, split screens, karaoke numbers and cinematic verve – all of which adds up to a kaleidoscopic portrait of why and how we still struggle so laughably, cringingly hard to make sense of love . . . and to hopefully make it real.

“500 Days of Summer” began in angst.  It was sparked by two young screenwriters — one single and recovering from a badly bruised heart, the other in a long-term relationship — reminiscing over romances that could have been, that maybe should have been, but somehow just . . . weren’t.  Almost everyone has had one and, in an age when everything seems to happen faster and more intensely, they seem to be ever more common.  So how — wondered writers Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber — does a young romantic survive such a reality? 

“Before I read ‘500 Days of Summer’ I’d completely lost interest in the romantic comedy genre.  Somewhere between puberty and when I started paying taxes, I stopped believing in the world these rosy cheeked girls in cute winter knit caps kept promising me.  What did it have to do with me?” said director Marc Webb.

“When I sat down to read the Xeroxed pages of this script, it was the title that finally got me. Needless to say, something clicked.  The writers conjured up a relationship that felt both artful and truthful, metaphorical and literal. We all know Summer because Summer isn’t just a girl. She’s an event,” added Webb.

“In many ways, making this movie has been the happy ending that I didn’t have with my Summer. Under the humor and the whimsy of ‘500 Days of Summer’ there’s a fundamental truth at play: yes, love can be cruel, harsh and difficult but it’s also, by far, the best thing life has to offer.”