Licorice Pizza

With apologies for the lack of reviews posted after cinema trips to catch Last Night In Soho, Eternals, King Richard, Spencer, Petite Maman and C’mon C’mon last year (as well as digital releases Red Notice, Finch and Don’t Look Up and a second viewing of Spider-Man – it’s just as good second time around) it’s a resumption of normal service in 2022 for The Brighton Film Club and what a place to start as no less than the great Paul Thomas Anderson has come out of the blocks with the first theatrical release of the year: Licorice Pizza.

Let’s clear that bizarre (and misspelled) name up for you right away; it refers to a slang name for vinyl and also a record store in LA in the 1970’s, the setting for this wonderfully enveloping film.

There’s a sense of autobiography here as this is a thoroughly ‘lived-in’ setting with absolutely immaculate attention to detail. We simply follow a few months in the lives of Gary Valentine and Alana Kane, a 15 year-old budding actor and 25 year-old photographer’s assistant respectively, as they meet and become friends and a ‘maybe-will they-won’t they’ relationship ensues.

What follows are a series of seemingly disparate set pieces as the wiser-than-his-years Valentine tries to set up various businesses and a smattering of elite-level cameos come into play: Sean Penn, Tom Waits and Bradley Cooper to name a few.

It’s an unusual film as it certainly doesn’t play to traditional notions of what you might expect from something that could feasibly be described as ‘romantic’, ‘comedy’ or ‘coming of age.’ Similarly to Anderson’s previous LA-set Inherent Vice this is a film that you become a part of, living with these characters across this time in their lives.

It helps that the two leads (in their first roles no less) are spectacular: Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) has the wide-eyed wonder of a kid in love as Gary but the MVP is Alana Haim who, like Lady Gaga before her in A Star Is Born, could well find herself with awards nom’s aplenty. Anderson has directed her band Haim in various music videos (the sisters also play significant parts in the film) and that trust and history shows as she easily sets herself up for what could be a fruitful movie career if she chooses to head in that direction.

The film won’t be to all tastes, it is sedate in pace and old-fashioned in the sense that, like other films actually made in the era, the conversation scenes are a little more drawn out than what modern audiences are perhaps used to. In fact, I’d wager that you could present this film as actually being made in 1973 and you’d certainly convince some people that it was: the shot choices, film stock, styling, it just feels like a ‘classic’ film which is certainly to its credit.

I feel like it probably ranks fairly low in Anderson’s oeuvre, hardly a criticism when that’s stacked with all-timers, but it’s clearly a passion project for him and it shows. You can’t help but be swept along by the emotion, the performances and the needle-drops. It’s a film that’ll leave you smiling, and that’s never a bad thing.

4 stars ****