‘Licorice Pizza’ review: Alana Haim gives the breakout performance of the year in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sweetest slice of young love [Grade: A]

“You’re never going to remember me,” predicts Alana Kane early after meeting Gary Valentine in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest. That’s what she says anyway, but the subtext is clear. From the moment these two characters lock eyes, it’s clear that they’re lodged forever in each other’s brain boxes. Never mind the fact that there’s quite simply nothing forgettable about this woman.

No need to bury the lede: in her feature-film debut, Alana Haim feels even less a revelation than an inevitability, strolling into the film as if with the secret confidence that she’s about to deliver an all-timer of a breakout performance. And deliver she does. Not only does Haim’s twenty-something Jewish photographer’s assistant saunter effortlessly into the company of PTA’s most compelling characters, but in a year of mannered lead actress performances based on real-life figures, she stands strikingly apart. She’s funny, she’s fresh, and she provides a crystal clear portrait of a young woman who’d gladly barrel across the threshold of adulthood, were it not for the fact that she’s inexorably drawn to the follies and foibles of a younger man.

That’s understandable when said young man is played with such sizzlingly winning confidence as he’s given by Cooper Hoffman. It’s true that there’s an unmistakable emotional undercurrent for cinephiles, seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son in a PTA film. It’s true also that in one magical moment, as he rushes down the street to the strains of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” the camera gliding along a bit beside and behind him, one could be forgiven for thinking Hoffman Sr. has indeed been reincarnated.

But the son is an entirely different animal than the father, and Gary Valentine worlds apart from PSH’s nervy Boogie Nights loser or gentle Magnolia nurse. This kid is slick, a silver-tongued salesman and first-rate schmoozer who is as much an admirable go-getter as he is a cocky little stinker. In other words, he’s the perfect embodiment of that person you wish you’d never met, because now you can’t stop thinking about them. His meet-cute with Haim’s Alana, in line for high school picture day, is a breezy, sun-drenched lark. But it feels as seismic as the Millenium Falcon being tractor-beamed into the Death Star, as sexually charged as Jack and Rose locking eyes across the Titanic.

Not that PTA is interested in making much hay of the age difference between Gary and Alana. Y Tu Mama Tambien this is not, and while sex isn’t entirely off the table, this is more about a collision of spirits, its tone as light and sunny as its San Fernando Valley setting. The valley has played host to a number of PTA’s cinematic offerings, as a marijuana-hazed hedge maze in Inherent Vice or a site for Biblical reckoning in Magnolia. Here, it’s a full-on pinball machine, sending its protagonists bouncing around from one instantly iconic set piece to the next. 

Most of those set pieces are overseen by an Alice in Wonderland-esque rogues’ gallery of supporting bit parts, the most anticipated of which is most certainly Bradley Cooper, whose appearance as Barbra Streisand’s horned-up and hairy-chested boyfriend Jon Peters is indeed one of those great “I’m a movie star, now watch me go” type of performances. But the real scene-stealers here are Sean Penn as a William Holden-style actor, Tom Waits as his film director hype-man, and Phantom Thread’s Harriet Sansom Harris, who, as though mystified by her very presence, evaluates Alana Haim’s star power with such dead-on precision that the very quote should be instantly papered onto FYC ads over all of Los Angeles.

After all, it’s Haim with whom Anderson is most preoccupied. And it’s her performance which reveals Licorice Pizza to be not the Almost Famous-meets-Lady Bird style coming-of-age story that was initially expected. For underneath its shaggy, free-wheeling, devil-may-care exterior is an unmistakably melancholy meditation on how much of a total bummer it is to become an adult; how cathartic it would be to toss off the doubts and disappointments of grown-up life and run carefree through the streets with the wind in your hair and Bowie on the soundtrack.

Anderson has always brought a mischievously youthful vitality to his filmmaking. Who else would have made the most iconic quote from a fire-and-brimstone epic about the birth of capitalism milkshake-focused? Or subvert a Merchant-Ivory period romance with such very poisoned mushrooms? But working with Haim, Hoffman, and the rest of this young ensemble seems to have reminded him, and in turn reminds us, of this crucial fact. The result is a film that feels entirely regenerative, both in our faith that its director remains one of our greatest, and most surprising, American filmmakers, and in our belief that movies can, indeed, be a total fucking blast. It’s his funniest, his most joyous, and one of the best of the year. I never wanted it to end. 

Grade: A

Licorice Pizza will be released by MGM Studios in select theaters on November 26 and the wider in the coming weeks.