Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the hazy world of 1970s Los Angeles with a nostalgic love letter to being young and in search of a purpose in life.

As the uplifting funk of Taj Mahal’s ‘Tomorrow May Not Be Your Day’ fills the theatre and the end credits of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza begin to roll, you could be forgiven for tearing out of the cinema and onto the street, eating up pavement as you sprint towards the horizon; wind in your hair, air catching your far-out flared trousers, the comforting warmth of the early-evening Southern Californian heat putting a layer of sweat on the back of your neck, the purple sunset sky planting a lump in your throat for the nostalgia of the world that you have been transported to for the last two hours. 

Unfortunately, you are brought back to reality by the brightness of the theatre lights. Maybe you aren’t in California. Maybe you weren’t alive in the seventies. Maybe you don’t enjoy running everywhere as much as Alana and Gary do in Licorice Pizza. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t have fun.

Licorice Pizza follows Alana Kane and Gary Valentine as they embark on a journey through romance-turned-friendship-turned-maybe-I-hate-you-or-maybe-we’re-soulmates, set against the backdrop of LA’s San Fernando Valley in 1973. Valentine is a 15-year-old child actor and entrepreneur who carries himself with the self-confidence normally found in someone twice his age. Kane is in her mid-twenties, aimlessly working as an assistant to a photographer who specialises in high school yearbook pictures.

The pair meet when Alana catches Gary’s eye while he waits in the conveyor belt queue to have his class picture taken and he attempts to woo her by inviting her to join him at his favourite restaurant. Despite Alana’s best defence – a combination of eye-rolls and cynical put-downs – the intrigue surrounding this impossibly assured high schooler is too alluring and, against her better judgement, she decides to take Gary up on his offer.

Despite defusing Gary’s romantic advances, Alana is drawn to the way he appears to have his (technical term) shit together. While Alana struggles with her own rudderless journey and quarter-life yearning for some sort of direction, her new teenage companion has an impressive résumé that boasts film and television credits, he’s used his showbiz earnings to start a PR company and employs his own mother, he’s even on first name terms with the owner of the restaurant where he eats every Thursday night. 

Gary brings Alana along on the surreal ride that is the life of the San Fernando Valley’s most eligible teenage actor and business mogul. One day it’s a trip to New York for a TV appearance, the next they are starting a business that sells the latest in cutting-edge waterbed technology. They kickstart Alana’s acting career, encounter legendary film industry figures, and start a pinball arcade empire. They even dip their toes into politics. 

Licorice Pizza is based on the early life of Gary Goetzman, a former child actor who subsequently carved out a successful career in the film industry, co-founding a production company with Tom Hanks and producing films as varied as Charlie Wilson’s War, Mamma Mia!, and The Polar Express. Director Paul Thomas Anderson – whose own father was a famous television announcer who socialised with other showbiz figures – recognised parallels with his own teenage experiences as a young person growing up on the periphery of the Hollywood system. 

The real Gary Goetzman (top right) in family comedy Yours, Mines and Ours (1968); Cooper Hoffman as the fictional Gary Valentine

Episodic in nature, Anderson stated that he wanted the film to feel like a series of stories that someone would share at a bar: ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I was arrested for murder?’ Some people may find that the film suffers by jerking from one elaborate scheme to another, but the teenage Goetzman did set up a waterbed business; he did open a pinball arcade. The film’s structure – a hair-brained scheme here, an encounter with a ridiculous showbiz figure there – reflects the reality of life in LA in the seventies; it represents the idea that everyone who experienced the city during this period will have their own anecdotes with their own mindboggling twists.

This is typified by the cameos from Bradley Cooper and Sean Penn, who both portray fictional versions of two real-life Hollywood heavyweights from the period. The behaviour of each character seems completely ridiculous and over-the-top, but it’s exactly the kind of thing these people – with so much power and influence in the real-life playground where they are adored as godlike figures – would do, before camera phones, social media and TMZ removed a celebrity’s ability to get away with things. These mythical stories of insane behaviour are why Hollywood and Los Angeles of the seventies have such an enduring allure; it’s why the figures who would traditionally fly under the radar – like studio bosses or film producers – have had so many books and films written about their antics during this golden age of film.

Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, real-life Hollywood producer, inspiration for LA satire Shampoo, and boyfriend of Barbra Streisand (no, Strei-sand).

Licorice Pizza is anchored by sensational performances from two first-time actors. 

Whilst in attendance at a party, a friend of the band HAIM overheard Paul Thomas Anderson discussing his love for the pop-rock sisters who hail from the same San Fernando Valley that he has always called home. Anderson passed on his email address and after some back and forth, he and his wife (actress Maya Rudolph, Bridesmaids) hosted the sisters for dinner. This encounter sparked a close creative partnership that has spanned several albums and multiple music videos. 

Having forged a close relationship with the band over the last seven years, Anderson recognised something within lead guitarist Alana Haim that compelled him to write the part of Alana specifically for her. He describes her as having a ‘terrier-like’ energy that comes from being the youngest of the Haim sisters: ‘she’s always scrapping for a fight, even though she’s got this beaming smile and sweet energy, she’s a scrapper’. 

Anderson’s description of Haim is exactly what we see on screen. She jolts from the performative, playful cynicism of her first meeting with Gary to an angelic, wide-eyed innocence while holding her own opposite Sean Penn. She attended a week-long crash course in truck driving in order to get behind the wheel in a scene where an unfortunate incident leads to a risky downhill slalom, and her youngest sister scrappiness is showcased as she clashes with her on-screen family (who are conveniently played by her real-life mother, father, and sisters from HAIM, lead singer Danielle and bassist Este – but we’ll let her off with that). 

A Best Actress nomination is inevitable at this year’s Academy Awards, the only question is whether Haim will win. Her closest competition may come from Kristen Stewart’s performance as Princess Diana in Spencer which, whilst great, has none of the range and dynamism achieved by Haim in Licorice Pizza. The performance is so pure and convincing that you can’t separate the on-screen Alana from the real-life Alana. Perhaps it’s the fact that she is not someone who we usually see on the big screen, a lead role filled by a face that isn’t familiar. That quality of anonymity is shared by her screen partner. 

Gary Valentine is played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman (senior) appeared in five of the seven films made by Anderson before the actor’s tragic drug overdose death in 2014; from a single scene in the director’s 1996 debut Hard Eight to an Oscar-nominated turn in 2012’s The Master. 

With his father and Anderson enjoying such a fruitful creative relationship, Cooper Hoffman has known Paul Thomas Anderson his entire life. Unlike Alana Haim, however, Gary wasn’t written with Cooper in mind. Anderson recounted how casting the male lead initially followed the usual path of auditioning professional actors, but a lack of chemistry with Haim and a bigger interest in ‘their own vanity or Disney projects’ meant finding the right person to play Gary Valentine proved difficult. It was only after the unsuccessful audition process that Anderson considered Hoffman – with no prior acting experience – for the role. According to Anderson, Hoffman was already comfortable around the Haim sisters, having been babysat by them while staying at Anderson’s home throughout his youth and teenage years. 

Hoffman’s performance is the perfect foil for Haim’s Alana. When she’s fed up and dripping with apathy, Hoffman’s Gary is uber-confident and full of life. When Alana questions Gary’s manly coolness, he’s more than equipped to puff on a cigarette (m’lady). A particular highlight is a scene where Gary and Alana both dine separately at the same restaurant during a downturn in their relationship; Hoffman maintains his ‘assassin’s focus’ and even threatens to order his table four martinis to one-up the fun he can see being had over at Alana’s table, in a manner reminiscent of the supreme confidence from a coked-up Todd Parker in Anderson’s earlier seventies film, Boogie Nights.  

Anderson is often called the actor’s director, owing to the complex, layered material he writes and the platform that he gives actors to excel in their field, but to get such a consistent quality of performance throughout the film from two untrained leads is remarkable. Before Licorice Pizza, each of Anderson’s last four films had been fronted by either Daniel Day-Lewis or Joaquin Phoenix, two actors widely recognised as masters of their craft and recipients of Best Actor Academy Awards. While Licorice Pizza doesn’t contain material that is quite as intricate as The Master or There Will Be Blood, it shouldn’t downplay how impressive it is for turns from Day-Lewis and Phoenix to be followed by two first-time actors and for there to be no noticeable reduction in quality when charting the lead acting performances in Anderson’s filmography.

Licorice Pizza arrives with Paul Thomas Anderson in a period of serenity in his career, comfortable in fatherhood and middle age with less interest in staging grandiose melodrama or weighty dialogue sessions. A result of filming during the COVID-19 pandemic was that the wider cast is made up of Anderson’s friends, family, and neighbours, with all four of his kids appearing in the film (plus cameos from John C. Reilly and Leonardo DiCaprio’s father – but blink and you’ll miss them). In interviews with Anderson and his editor, Andy Jurgensen, they talk about their daily routine of screening the daily footage in Anderson’s home after filming had wrapped each day. It paints a picture of a wholesome, family environment that is almost tangible on-screen when viewing the finished film. 

Licorice Pizza will endure as a masterfully crafted relic of California in the seventies. Given the unlimited list of slappers, bangers, and groovers from the period, it’s mandatory for any seventies film to have a killer soundtrack. Anderson set the bar with Boogie Nights and, whilst Licorice Pizza’s soundtrack features a wider range of music and some subtle choices, there is still room for Bowie and McCartney, plus a special mention for the use of The Doors’ ‘Peace Frog’, which makes loading a truck with waterbed supplies feel like you’re witnessing a drug deal. The soundtrack is the cherry on top that completes the absolute authenticity that we see on screen; the gorgeous 35mm cinematography that breeds life to the glaring sun or the pastel-tinged interior scenes; the heavenly white flashes that shine from a spotlight over a character’s shoulder when we’re hanging out at the pinball arcade or teenage fair. Even the unusual sensation of a film anchored by two unfamiliar faces - acne on show - rather than perfectly manicured, chiselled film stars who have spent hours in a makeup chair to be made to look like they aren’t wearing any makeup. Anderson stated that in production he encouraged everyone to ‘get outside, get sunburn and sun-bleached hair’ between takes, that he wanted bags under their eyes. Wartz-n-all, the way things used to be.

At its heart, Licorice Pizza is a love story from a bygone era that’s never coming back; a charming tribute to the kind of adolescence that has been consigned to history. Gary meets Alana in person, unloads highlights from his résumé, buys her dinner, offers her advice on her purpose in life, then he politely asks for her phone number. Licorice Pizza puts the essence of actual human interaction at the centre of the film, it revels in the simplicity of life. The irony is that we watch this in 2021 with a twinkle in our eye, longing for the same kind of purity in our own lives as if it has become obsolete by force; but it’s a choice we’ve made ourselves. 

We see Gary and Alana wrestle with the reality of growing up, rather than the freshly pressed fairy tale that we’re tuned to expect. Alana is disappointed every time she encounters someone who should be her dream man. She’s subjected to juvenile behaviour by the so-called mature men that she expects to sweep her off her feet into adulthood. Each time Alana is let down by the thing that’s supposed to fix things, the teenage Gary Valentine - the kid who is supposed inexperienced and immature - is on-hand to be the one who makes things right.

On the day they meet, Gary tells Alana that he is ‘not going to forget you, and you’re not going to forget me’. After witnessing these two screen debuts, I don’t think any of us will be forgetting either of them in a hurry.