LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
THERE ARE EYE-CATCHING SCREEN DEBUTS FOR POPSTAR ALANA HAM AND COOPER HOFFMAN IN SEVENTIES ROMANCE
LICORICE PIZZA (15)
TAKING its title from a California music store chain and the slang term for a vinyl record, writerdirector Paul Thomas Anderson’s nostalgia-drenched coming-ofage yarn chronicles pangs of first love in the 1973 San Fernando Valley with the same free-flowing bonhomie as George Lucas’s American Graffiti.
Groove is in the hearts of the lovable and occasionally infuriating central characters – a no-nonsense 25-year-old photographer’s assistant Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and a self-assured 15-year-old child star Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) – when their paths cross at his school yearbook picture shoot.
Their first meeting is captured in the zinging dialogue of Anderson’s script, where prideful boasts (“I’m a showman. It’s my calling...”) are offset by flashes of painful and piercing self-realisation (“I don’t know how to do anything else.”)
Fate sees Alana chaperone him for a public appearance in New York and she briefly dates Gary’s rival (Skyler Gisondo) to the dismay of her smitten ward.
The topsy-turvy relationship recalibrates when Gary starts a water bed business and invites Alana to dip her toes into the shallow end of the showbusiness pool where he paddles.
Close encounters with gung-ho actor Jack Holden (Sean Penn), sexually voracious film producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper) and freshfaced mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie) give Alana bountiful food for thought.
The filmmaker wrote the female lead specifically for Haim – onethird of the Los Angeles-based pop rock trio comprising sisters Alana, Danielle and Este, who portray bickering siblings on screen and are joined by their real-life parents Moti and Donna for amusing scenes of domestic discord around the dinner table.
It is a mesmerising big-screen acting debut from the youngest member of the musical trinity, with an outside chance of an Oscar nomination for her endearing portrayal of a free spirit, who is California dreamin’ of something better than the wandering hands of her boss.
Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, is almost as beguiling in his debut role, exuding optimism in every impeccably period-detailed scene.
Licorice Pizza is scruffily charming and aimless like the characters it follows. Anderson’s script ricochets at speed between bittersweet vignettes like a shiny orb bouncing off bumpers in one of the newly legalised pinball machines that opportunist Gary invests in.
With a couple of cheeky nudges, his excitable customers and Anderson’s picture score big.
■ Released: January 1