No one is fonder of a small-time wheeler-dealer than Paul Thomas Anderson, and Gary’s last name is “Valentine” for a reason: the man behind the camera clearly loves this brashly self-confident boy, not least because the actor playing him is the 18-year-old son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s longtime collaborator and close friend.
From the moment Alana first appears, resplendent in a miniskirt and wedge sandals, in the breezeway of Gary’s San Fernando Valley high school, she radiates a winning mix of cocky bravado and goofy vulnerability.
When Gary, a part-time working actor with a busy single mother, needs an adult chaperone to travel to a publicity appearance in New York, he convinces Alana to accompany him as his “guardian.” Later they try unsuccessfully to launch her in her own acting career, with Gary as her enthusiastic if less than knowledgeable coach.
At the Tail o’ the Cock, the Studio City steakhouse Gary treats as his personal social club, they meet a hard-drinking, William Holden-esque actor named Jack Holden , the real-life celebrity hairstylist and legendary womanizer who is said to have been the inspiration for Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo.
Though the dialogue is too laden with well-placed zingers to have been improvised on-set, there is a sense that the story is bubbling directly out of its creator’s brain, the freewheeling camera work and a shimmering Jonny Greenwood score.
Late in the film Alana begins working for a progressive young mayoral candidate, Joel Wachs , whose private life offers a tragic glimpse of one feature of late 20th-century life decidedly not worthy of nostalgia.
To be sure, the movie is set in a time and place when a high-schooler courting a twentysomething peer would likely not have been the scandal it would be today, but Anderson, whose own oldest child is around the Gary character’s age, might nonetheless have inserted at least one character who objected to the age gap.
But in large part thanks to its fresh-faced stars, the charming Hoffman and the wildly charismatic Haim, I’m hard pressed to think of a recent movie whose world I would have liked to stay in longer.