#MovieReview: Licorice Pizza – A love letter to youth and first love

Licorice Pizza is a heady, dreamlike trip through nostalgia that rarely hits a false note, despite casting 2 newcomers in the lead roles.

The latest film from renowned director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of his most accessible and enjoyable, choosing to mine young romance rather than megalomania and obsession.

Anderson is a director whose filmography has both hardcore defenders and detractors alike, but one can hardly imagine Licorice Pizza being maligned.

There are reasonable critiques to make, with an age-inappropriate relationship and vaguely offensive faux-Japanese accent, but it is never unlikeable.

In fact, such is the accuracy with which Anderson mines his own childhood and teenage years, that after 2 hours you feel as if you too, have experienced youth in the Nixon-era San Fernando valley.

Spoilers to follow

Licorice Pizza opens on 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman – the son of late Philip Seymour-Hoffman), an actor and hustler with seemingly endless ambition.

In an early scene he is taken in by Alana Kane (Alana Haim of pop rock band HAIM fame), a woman 10 years his senior who feels trapped in her dead-end photographer’s assistant job.

Valentine is wittily charming and persistent, trying to hustle a date with Kane, but she reminds him that he is “just a child”.

Nevertheless, she is taken with his access to fame through his acting career and career goals that far outweigh her own. And despite the age difference, there is no denying their chemistry.

Sure, if the genders were reversed, then the film might have seemed more seedy and exploitative, but Anderson treats the relationship with enough care that it never appears that way.

Indeed, the casting of 2 newcomers aids his storyline – both are wide-eyed in their big screen innocence and it never feels as if either takes advantage of the other. It is Harold and Maude without the tragedy.

The duo flit in and out of each others lives with Valentine insistent on their romantic viability, while Kane tries to rationalise the relationship to herself as purely platonic friendship.

Licorice Pizza is a film without a major narrative thrust; Anderson simply submerges you in the material in an effort to replicate the feeling of his youth.

It is another time, simpler in many ways and problematic in more still, and Anderson does not shy away from showing the difficult parts.

To try and explain the plot is an exercise in futility, but somehow the loosely-linked vignettes come together in a package that is wholly satisfactory.

This is a master at work, navigating his memory and its inconsistencies in such a way that is recognisable for anyone, even those who grew up halfway across the world.

Ultimately, children and teenagers have a shared experience despite their upbringings and one’s own nostalgia will no doubt be stirred upon first viewing.

Watch it for two truly astonishing first time performances, but primarily for the way it is going to make you feel.

With everything going on in the world at the moment, experience the hopeful innocence and heartbreak of first love again.

Rated 18 for sexual material, language and some drug use.

5/5.

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