Paul Thomas Anderson loves start-up entrepreneurs and fly-by-night schemes: you could run a straight line between There Will Be Blood’s (2007) oil magnate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Punch-Drunk Love’s (2002) humble toilet-plunger impresario Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) just as easily as you could imagine the latter signing up for one of the “Seduce and Destroy” seminars run by Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) in Magnolia (1999). The ultimate huckster in the PTACU would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd in The Master (2012), a Wellesian tyro who’s found a way to package and sell the prospect of returning to a “state of perfect”—a costly but finally priceless means of exorcising any and all inherent vice. Operators are standing by.
Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), the resourceful 15-year-old pisher at the centre of Licorice Pizza, is at one the most benign and most unformed of Anderson’s confidence men. In between acting gigs that have left him with plenty of walking-around money and a less-than-healthy disrespect for the conventions of adolescence (like going to school), Gary opens a profitable sale-and-delivery business in an abandoned storefront, staffed with pals and charging COD. As is the case with so many grand gestures throughout history, though, he’s just a boy trying to impress a girl: if his twentysomething friend Alana (Alana Haim) won’t consider dating Gary because he’s too young, maybe cornering the market on waterbeds in the San Fernando Valley will make him desirable beyond his years.
Chutzpah is the not-so-secret subject of Licorice Pizza, and Alana—the youngest of three sisters in a conservative Jewish family whose patriarch won’t stand for whispers of atheism at the Shabbat table—has at least as much of the stuff as Gary. The film, which, as advertised, is looser and less severe than anything Anderson has made since Punch-Drunk Love, chases Gary as he chases Alana—sometimes passionately, sometimes half-heartedly, sometimes for want of anything better to do—and chases Alana as she tries to grab onto something of her own: an acting career, a political awakening, an age-appropriate boyfriend. Anything to keep her from doting daily on Gary and aiding and abetting his schemes, or dwelling on why someone with her gifts and brains is so content playing Wendy to a tribe of Lost Boys, or wondering whether the grown-up men waiting out there in the wilds of Studio City represent anything better than the juvenile delinquents in her midst.
There is real anxiety here, and Anderson—who specializes in narratives about hinge moments in cultural (2017) at the apex of the director’s gallery of female performances: her Alana is plausibly self-divided, with the actress’ gawkiness suggesting a body in the process of pulling itself in two directions at once. Hoffman, meanwhile—who, as the son of the late Anderson stock company player, carries inescapable familial associations into his feature debut—is wonderfully crafty and craven as Gary, keeping his eyes on the prize at all times. And if the victories he scores in love and business feel provisional, it suits a movie that finds the seam between definitive and specific—between being story of a certain generation and story—and turns into its own cozily interlaced little sweet spot.
