Licorice Pizza

Licorice? What's licorice? Oh Liquorice. Ah the yanks, always simplifying everything. Liquorice on a pizza though? Grim. Ok it's the name of a chain of record stores but still. The title's the only grim thing about Paul Thomas Anderson's latest trip into the San Fernando valley. You'll leave this one smiling. But feeling a little odd about what you've just seen too.

He doesn't look that much like his father tbh but there's something in the smile that's familiar, maybe in the glint of his eyes too. The physical heft is unmistakable though. Philip Seymour Hoffman didn't get too many hard man roles but he could definitely fuck you up if he wanted to. His son Cooper (playing Gary Valentine) has his father's lumbering presence but he inherited his charm too. The first time we meet him he's standing in line for a school photo when he encounters Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a photographer's assistant. He goes in for the kill like a shark smelling blood, confidence personified due to his acting background. She's taken aback but she doesn't run away. He's 15. She's 25. The difference is an issue for her but not for him. They start spending time together. Lorry's, local politics, waterbeds and false accusations of murder, young Americans in 1973. They've a memorable time ahead.

If you can get past the weird and unrealistic friendship at the heart of Licorice Pizza you'll enjoy it. It might take a while to click into gear for you though. It feels aimless and unfocused at first, costing along on easy charm, a killer soundtrack and a glorious evocation of a strange time in America. Then you'll come to realise that story/narrative/plot isn't really the point of this one, it's more of a mood piece than anything else, feeling like a mish-mash of memories of a point in one's youth instead of a snapshot of an era. Plot points vanish only to be instantly replaced with others, massively larger than life characters (like Sean Penn's William Holden inspired Jack Holden or Bradley Cooper's amazing Jon Peters, a character you'd happily spend an entire film with) appear suddenly and disappear just as fast. 

It feels dreamy, it looks dreamy, the dreamy feel extends to it's logic. It's central pairing doesn't make sense, maybe it's not supposed to. PTA never judges it, it just is. He lets us wax and wane between our leads, each fully developed, each with a life away from each other but the film buzzes when they are together, him loving it, her stressed out about it, a wordless phone call, a sprint across a golf course, that first meet cute, a backwards downhill terror spin to escape the wrath of a crazed film producer. Don't worry, that last bit will make perfect sense to you when you see it. 

You'd expect a director with such a vast talent pool of actors ready to work for him again (see if you can spot John C. Reilly's 2 second cameo) to have his best and brightest out front but this time we get two untested actors in their debut roles. Alana Haim, from the band Haim (PTA directed her band's videos and her band-mates and real life sisters play her sisters here) and Cooper Hoffman, son of the much missed Philip Seymour, Anderson's muse, who did wonderful work in The Master, Magnolia and Boogie Nights amongst others. It was a risk but it paid off beautifully and it's one that powers a film that you'll be thinking about for a while.

Licorice Pizza is in cinemas now. It's worth your time and it's a nice antidote to all that CGI in the other screens.