Licorice Pizza

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Running time: 2hr14 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

At an earlier point in Paul Thomas Anderson’s career, you wouldn’t have said romantic comedy was his sweet spot — and of course, if your definition of “romantic comedy” is strictly limited to the realm of Bridget Jones et al, it still very much isn’t. But in his last two films, Anderson has been lithely and wittily testing the limits of the genre, using it to explore relationships as perverse and curious and unpredictable as the average romcom dynamic is tidy and predetermined. 

Licorice Pizza, like Phantom Thread, is a study of magnetic human connection that isn’t necessarily good for either party — but then, magnetic human connection rarely thinks that way, or thinks at all. Alana (Alana Haim) is 25 and adrift in the sun-bleached whirl of ‘70s California, working as a photographer’s assistant but seemingly still interning at adulthood in general. High school student and would-be entrepreneur Gary (Cooper Hoffman), on the other hand, is 15 and itchy to be older, even as his juvenility betrays him time and again. When they meet and he swiftly, gauchely crushes on her, she’s embarrassed and intrigued in equal measure. What builds between them is an attraction, but not quite a romance: they recognise in each other a mutual unrest for a different stage of life, though not one that necessarily leads to the same place for both.

Of course, that age gap is a complication, the chief source of tension in an otherwise shaggy, loose-limbed groove of a movie, and Licorice Pizza treats it neither with uncompromising moralism nor blithe indifference. Adulthood is the barrier that separates Alana and Gary in a multitude of ways, not least because they have such different ideas of what it looks like.

In charting their awkward but insistent bond, Anderson’s script deftly and effortlessly shuffles between the lenses of his characters’ respective naïveté — a bit like an optician performing a sight test, where everything appears hazy to subtly different degrees, bar the odd stray surge of clarity. And both his first-time stars are wonderfully unformed and open-faced in ways that perfectly serve this criss-crossed coming-of-age narrative. Haim (baby sister of the band) and Hoffman (son of the late, much-missed Philip) are always in gangly motion, often rotating counter to the polished, vinyl-spinning swirl of Anderson’s typically vibrant, populated filmmaking, both finding their screen presence in real time.

LICORICE PIZZA (2021) Written by Paul Thomas Anderson | Shot by Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Bauman | Edited by Andy Jurgensen

In cinemas now.