Licorice Pizza — Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is a blissful freewheel

See the kid with the red hair in Paul Thomas Anderson’s frantic, blissful Licorice Pizza? Fifteen, something of a lump, at high school in LA circa 1973. You can smell the awkwardness, right? The nervous mumble of another coming of age? Except, no. In a film that is nothing but surprises, first is the bomb-proof self-confidence of teenage Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). Boggle as he smoothly asks the young woman assisting with school photographs for a date. Marvel when, after name-dropping his acting career, he says she should have dinner with him — “not my work”. And reel in shock when she says yes.

That’s Gary. But another revelation is that for all he can be vain, the film is not actually about him. Or rather it is, but also — perhaps more so — about the object of his desire, Alana Kane (Alana Haim). She is bored, drifting and 25; the age thing is why she says from the start, “We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend.” For now Gary settles for second best: a business partnership. Outgrowing child stardom, he needs another hustle. It comes selling waterbeds, a project less hare-brained than it sounds. Alana is roped in but still has to find her own place in the world (or at least LA). Frustrated young love is just one of the flippers in a pinball plot. 

The casting may be the biggest surprise of all. Neither star has acted on screen before, crazy when you see their ease before the camera, key to the lemon-scented freshness of it all. (The film feels too alive to be called nostalgic.) As the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, it is hard to miss the poignancy of Cooper Hoffman’s casting, though the movie never exploits it. Still, it is a strange moment when waterbed king Gary hears mattresses dismissed as old hat; among the roles his father played for Anderson was the crooked “Mattress Man” of Punch Drunk Love. (For fans of the director, Boogie Nights shares geography and era but there are motes of each of his movies here.)

In her day job, Haim is a successful musician. That much fits the LA the film unfolds in (physically, the San Fernando Valley). Here, the same basic mix of talent, charisma and chutzpah might end up deployed in any job in entertainment — and everything is entertainment. The movie is a Hollywood story, but only because Hollywood is the local industry. In work and life, we’re all delivering lines. Sometimes you’re the director. Sometimes you’re a prop.

That last part becomes literal when Alana is dragged into an old movie stunt, replayed by a veteran male lead (based on the real William Holden, played by Sean Penn). The scene is golden. It is also upstaged like everything else by another portrait of an actual Tinseltowner: Bradley Cooper’s riff on celebrity hairdresser/producer Jon Peters is wildly, hilariously pyrotechnic.

Such is the energy Anderson whips up, forever sending in chaos from the edge of the frame. The result is a giddy freewheel in which scenes never end how you or the characters expect, and what’s coming next is anyone’s guess. One tangent takes Alana into Californian politics and almost a whole other film. (Oddly, it might be Taxi Driver.) For Gary, there is the random, unfriendly attention of the police. The case is soon closed, but it leaves him shaken enough to take off with Alana at a sprint. A moment later, both are laughing again. A lot of darkness waits out there, but none of it can wipe the grins off their faces. Or ours. The movie is a sunshine tonic.

★★★★★

In US cinemas now and released in the UK on January 1