She wants the attention of the whole world. He just wants her attention. Tale as old as time. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s spin on a coming-of-age rom-com, Licorice Pizza, the he in question is a child actor and young upstart. His name is Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman and a dead ringer for his progeny) and he’s destined for great things. She has drifted through life. Her name is Alana Kane (Alana Haim, a wonderful find) and she takes shit from no one. Their paths collide in line at Gary’s high school yearbook photoshoot. She’s working the gig. He’s 15. She’s 25. Maybe. He invites her to dinner. She hesitates. “I just met the girl I’m gonna marry,” Gary tells his younger brother. He might have.
What follows is an episodic swirl of will-they-won’t-they young love as Gary and Alana navigate 1973 San Fernando Valley. The pair drift wherever the wind may blow, jumping on fads just as they begin to crest and riding the wave of life until the next shiny thing comes along. From starting a waterbed company to auditioning for films, volunteering for political campaigns and opening a pinball arcade, the two dash from one business venture to the other with the reckless abandon and energy that only a teenager possesses.
For Gary, his professional and personal matters remain interlocked, the confident wunderkind a Pied Piper type who has friends and followers all throughout the region. Old and young, high and low. Gary is a fixture of his community at 15 and Anderson’s often-hilarious script mines much of its absurdist comedy from this premise. Gary having a regular table at the local watering hole, Tail O’ the Cock, and the maître d’s familiarity with him and his circle, for example. Though sure to keep Gary firmly in the friend zone, Alana herself becomes enrapt in Gary’s orbit, drifting alongside him wherever his path may lead, even when those plans run out of gas, literally and metaphorically.
Licorice Pizza, named after a former chain of record shops in southern California, is one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s loosest films to date and moves with the chaotic energy of Inherent Vice and the flamboyant dream logic of Punch Drunk Love. It’s impossible to predict where anything is going because there’s no rhyme or reason to what these character’s want beyond Gary’s persistent pining for Alana and Alana’s wanton need to be noticed. Everything else is just details and the devils that lay within.
[READ MORE: Our review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread‘ starring Daniel Day Lewis’
This makes for a rather episodically-structured film that has no intention of following a traditional narrative arc and instead just kind of drifts and vibes its way from start to finish. Much like Gary and Alana. That works incredibly well for the first half but just as the whole of the country faces a gas crisis in 1973, so too does Licorice Pizza start to run out of steam in its back-half, arguably too messy and tangential to keep up the steady stream of cackles and underlying heartfelt longing.
Pitstops with one-off characters played by Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Bennie Safdie allow a glimpse into the world of adults, a realm polluted with problems and drama that Gary and Alana rub up briefly against before dashing away. Rage, addiction, shame, lust – each character is their own harbinger of some terrible adult inherent vice and we see the tragedy and hilarity of their villainy through the eyes of the young Gary and Alana, for whom everything is some variant of a punchline.
Youth may be wasted on the young but Gary Valentine is the antithesis to this sentiment. He wants to seize the world, his meager 15 years on Earth be damned, and he wants to fulfill that promise to his kid brother that Alana will someday be his bride. The on-again-off-again couple are always running – a bit of irony because they have all the time in the world. A physical expression of the youthful energy that underscores the meshugas of Licorice Pizza. The world is always in some state of upheaval, Anderson’s picture contemplates. Maybe it’s best to just let it all go, throw the truck in reverse, and vibe with it.
CONCLUSION: ‘Licorice Pizza’ is a coming-of-age romantic-comedy that only Paul Thomas Anderson could tell. An anarchic swirl of memories and mood make for a unique, and uniquely hysterical, vision of the woes of friendship and first love.
B+
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