The words “Licorice Pizza” are never spoken in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, Licorice Pizza, and so you may wonder where the title comes from, especially if you weren’t in Southern California in the ’70s.
One of them is Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was one of Anderson’s regular collaborators.
At the beginning of the movie, Gary meets a 20-something photographer’s assistant named Alana; she’s played by Alana Haim, who’s part of a rock trio, Haim, with her two sisters.
The movie is something of a romantic comedy, but a platonic one.
Alana admires Gary’s entrepreneurial spirit, but she’s also easily turned off by his immaturity and wonders why she’s hanging out with him and his 15-year-old friends to begin with.
At one point, Alana is clearly out of her element when she has drinks with a motorcycle-riding actor who’s meant to evoke William Holden, played by a gravel-voiced Sean Penn.
Gary Valentine is a young stand-in for Gary Goetzman, a prolific film and TV producer whose colorful stories about ’70s Hollywood, including his own start as a child actor, drive a lot of the plot in Licorice Pizza.
And the men who work in the movies may be the worst of all: For all his affection for old Hollywood, Anderson isn’t afraid to lay bare the tawdry side of the industry and the dangers it poses, especially for an impressionable young woman like Alana.
Both Hoffman and Haim are terrific, and Haim in particular has so much natural warmth and charisma that you’d gladly follow her into another movie — especially if it were as endearing and singular as this one.