Licorice Pizza Review

Anderson's San Fernando Valley film has almost no plot and an enormous amount of momentum, which is a strange trick to pull across two hours and thirteen minutes. Gary is a fifteen-year-old child actor turned waterbed salesman turned pinball entrepreneur; Alana is twenty five and adrift, and the film is honest that the gap between them is a problem for both rather than a romance to be cheered. Alana Haim, in her first acting role, is a real discovery: prickly, funny, able to turn on a single line, and the film would collapse without her.

Cooper Hoffman matches her with an unearned confidence that is exactly right for the character. The structure is a string of anecdotes, and the ones that land, a truck reversed downhill with no engine, Bradley Cooper's Jon Peters, land very hard. Two scenes built around a racist restaurateur are a serious misjudgment and the film never manages a defense for them. What survives is texture, 1973 light, and two people running toward each other because there is nowhere else to run.