It may be hard to remember that, once upon a time, there were lots of movies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, a freewheeling, occasionally moving and gut-busting film so out of touch with the times that it might as well have appeared buried in between rotting cans filled with bloodshot reels of King Frat or The First Turn-On. Ever since easy access to a whole wide world of internet pornography drove the Sex Comedy to extinction and John Hughes-style sentimentalism around cliques and “assigned roles” wrecked the easy-going ways of the Teen Movie (both observations that the late-and-great Mike “McBeardo” McPadden made in his all-encompassing guide to the genres, Teen Movie Hell), we’ve had a strange dearth of both, barring exceptions like The To-Do List and a bunch of ill-fated romances, YA adaptations, and general teen slasher movies. One might argue that the streaming series represents the best way forward for any story related to teenage life, given the flow of high school time seems to practically beg for serialization, but beyond a few sensationalistic new additions such as Euphoria or 13 Reasons Why pitched squarely at the heads of panicked parents and sex-starved millennials, we’re mainly living in the past even in our Netflix-centric future. Saved by the Bell came back; Riverdale dominates the CW line-up when it’s not getting overshadowed by superheroes. Our world may seem as if it’s getting more inclusive and righteous, but it’s slowly drifting away from passion and all of the messy needy things that human desire entails.
So, it’s befitting that a filmmaker like PTA, who has spent nearly all of the 21st century looking back at our past through the lens of a 70MM film camera – Punch-Drunk Love excepted on both counts, There Will Be Blood removed for its smaller format – would venture headfirst into the genre’s heyday to try and recapture some of its magic. Above all else, Licorice Pizza is an exploration of a kind of modern ennui, refracted through the prism of the Teen Movie, and PTA does so by directly contrasting a certain modern archetype – that of the lost, living-at-home adult adolescent – with the kind of protagonist you’d find in one of those movies back then. You might only remember the tits, but teen movies featured a certain kind of motivated lead: One who either worked a job and clashed with his bosses over the soul of the business – Meatballs, Joysticks, you name it – or sought out a certain kind of accomplishment be it in the form of winning a big contest or sporting event which their romantic and sexual pursuits complemented or challenged (if you want an example of a Teen Movie that breaks the mold there, look no further than Robert Towne’s Personal Best, which isn’t necessarily a comedy, but features a female lead, played by Mariel Hemingway, struggling between Olympic qualifying and her love for a rival). Those roles here belong to Alana (Alana Haim), the aimless and verbally pugnacious 25-year-old shitkicker, and Gary (Cooper Hoffmann, Philip Seymour’s son), a 15-year-old who is somehow perpetually starting businesses while also maintaining a primary career as an actor while also attending high school. See?
Their flirtation begins on Picture Day at Gary’s high school on one fateful afternoon in 1973, elevated by Anderson and co-cinematographer Michael Baumann’s celluloid capture of the bright-yet-warm colors of the California afternoon. Alana’s working as an assistant to the photographer, handing out forms and slips to the kids in line, and Gary takes notice of her and initiates a kind of flirty, teasing conversation, full of relentless pressure delivered in a charming-yet-goofy fashion. It’s the kind of bullshit that teens do, knowing that they most likely have no shot at all with the attractive older person in their purview, but there’s something intriguing about him to Alana: He’s motivated, compared to the people in her life who are either comfortably stagnant or who have achieved some accomplishment that’s far beyond the kind of thing that she can hope for itself. So, she takes a chance on this goofy-ass kid when he says that he can get them a table at a steakhouse and that he knows the owners and waiters, and is kind of shocked when she shows up and discovers that, in fact, he does, walking through the dining room with the kind of confident ease that only someone who has that built those relationships fully through years of patronage and conversation and decent tipping has. From there, the pair go on a series of adventures, such as a visit to New York, where Alana acts as Gary’s chaperone at a TV show taping while attempting to hook up with one of the other elder child actors in the ensemble, or when Gary gets the idea to start a waterbed business that transforms into a kind of teen hangout/paradise for the bored SoCal residents around them, or when Alaina winds up on a date with a William Holden-like actor (Sean Penn) and who decides to take her for a jump on his motorcycle on the back nine at the local golf course, or a post-store-closing waterbed delivery to fucking Jon Peters (a fantastic, manic Bradley Cooper), the hairdresser-turned-producer who is infamous among nerd circles for demanding that Kevin Smith put a giant spider monster in his draft of Superman Lives. And those are just a few of the events in this story.
However, PTA never lets the movie overwhelm you: Despite its madcap-antics and screwball-style dialogue delivery, it’s got a similar kind of laconic sensibility to his other recent work in how it moves from scene-to-scene. Events and relationships build at a natural pace, though they never get boring, and it remains amusing and engaging throughout. It’s gorgeously shot, with the production design echoing the depth of immersive realization of period-adjacent LA in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the sets, especially, are brilliantly done. One only needs to see the Teen Convention that Gary takes his Water Bed company to for its debut for one to see how deeply immersed in the era that the director is, given that it’s stacked full of fun little callbacks to the media and design of that age when such things were relegated to the minor interest of bored teenagers rather than for the cultural consumption of all adults. Yet they rarely overwhelm the frame for nostalgia’s sake, as most of them inform the plot, such as the gas crisis that causes cars to line-up around the block for empty pumps and which ultimately motivates Gary to get out of the Waterbed business, or are simply just absorbing window-dressing that never gets in the way of what you’re watching (much like OUATIH) It helps that the situations in Licorice Pizza’s script are given some manner of drunken-story authenticity by PTA’s pal Gary Goetzman, whose tales of his youth as a child actor inspired the genesis for the project itself, and whose name our younger co-lead shares. As exaggerated and wild as these vignettes are, they are endowed with plausibility, especially if you happen to know (or lived through) that period in Hollywood history.
What may surprise you about Licorice Pizza, however, is how chaste it is, especially from the man who took the gristle of the porn industry and turned it into a family-sized fillet. Sure, it’s raunchy and goofy, filled to the brim with cussin’ and fuckin’, but it’s ultimately tertiary to the developing romance at the film’s nucleus, which outside of that one scene that’s plastered all over the trailers — you know, the slap — remains full of yearning and emotion. One could argue that this is a reflection of the pre-Animal House state of teen cinema, but PTA’s more explicit in his manner when it comes to the characters at the side. It’s not a film about sex: It’s about a kind of yearning that one has when they’re stuck and stagnant, looking for connection in a world that they’re not altogether prepared or suited for, and about what unlikely forms that connection might take. On the other hand, I don’t hold it against anyone if they’re made uncomfortable by this age dimensions of this romance, as innocent as it may be as depicted here, but I also don’t think that PTA’s endorsing their actions or asking for ours: Rather he’s just superimposing the problems of these decades on top of each other, using his characters as a broader kind of metaphor for what we’re losing in the modern era — economically, technologically — while juxtaposing what exactly we’ve gained and how awful that era could be.
This is one of the reasons I think he moved away from the title Soggy Bottom, as funny as it might be in context, instead choosing the name of a long-lost LA-area record store chain from then. Record stores were third places, where music nerds could meet up and chat and interact between the aisles, which modernity rendered niche for a mixture of convenience and control. You could take a chance and be challenged, either by a record or someone wandering in the aisles and ultimately find some sort of fulfillment or at least a story to tell along the way. Perhaps that’s the true nexus of Licorice Pizza’s nostalgia, as it mourns a kind of discovery that was only possible before the advent of cellphones, where one’s waterbed shop could become a stuffed-to-the-gills hangout spot with pot smoke in the air and an out-of-tune local band playing in the foyer and bicycles littering the sidewalk outside. The internet giveth and taketh away, but it doesn’t have to.