(500) Days of Summer is about unreciprocated love and broken hearts, with some comedy thrown in. Tom  (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, below) loves Summer; Summer (Deschanel) thinks love is just a fantasy. “I don’t think Summer’s cynical, I think she’s just a product of her experience, which is not my experience,” Deschanel says. “And I think Tom and Summer sort of represent the two sides of our generation’s ambivalence toward love … true romantic love is no longer a luxury. And that things like marriage aren’t a necessity.”

Deschanel was attracted to the film because “it was a very entertaining script,” which seems to play into her decision for every movie she chooses. “I usually just look at what I’m entertained by at the moment,” Deschanel says. “And whether my voice can be that character’s voice.”

One thing that brings the main characters together in (500) Days of Summer is music. The two bond over karaoke and a mutual love for the band The Smiths. On the film’s soundtrack, Deschanel and her She & Him partner M. Ward cover The Smiths’ Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want. But on She & Him’s first album, Volume One, Deschanel wrote most of the songs. “I just like to tell stories,” Deschanel says. “I’ll just get little bits of stories as I’m going about my day.” What about a second album? “I don’t know exactly when it’s going to come out because of scheduling and stuff like that but we’re working on it pretty steadily.”

Her film and music endeavors have earned Deschanel a strong fan base, especially among young men. Maxim included Deschanel on its Maxim Hot 100 List in 2004 and 2008, something Deschanel says is “really, really weird to me.” She has her own ideas about what’s hot. “I think people being themselves is sexy,” she says. “The least sexy thing in the world is trying to be sexy, in my opinion.”