Chocolate Manhole Covers

I'm mot  particular fan of PT Anderson - more or a Wes or Paul WS guy. But Licorice Pizza (2022) looked interesting, so I figured, why not?

It's about a 15-year-old boy, Cooper Hoffman, who meets and woos 25-year-old Alana Haim (of the band Haim). She's the photographer's assistant when he's getting his school picture taken, and he asks her out to a classy steakhouse. You see, he was member of the cast of a popular sitcom, so he has a little money to throw around. She's a bit at loose ends, so she takes him up on it. And although she tries to shut him down repeatedly, they become friends.

Hoffman's character is based on a childhood friend of Anderson's. He was a child actor who was always hustling - getting in on the ground floor of the waterbed craze in the early 70s. He knows a bunch of adults from the biz - agents, directors, other actors, and also has a bunch of other 15-year-olds working for him. Although he is kind of chubby and has a terrible haircut, he's full of confidence and ambition.

Haim, on the other hand, is a bit adrift. She lives with her parents and sisters, all played by her real-life parents and her sisters, the band Haim. She gets a lot of ribbing about not having a boyfriend. Wait until they find out who she's hanging around with.

So they have kooky adventures. They deliver a waterbed to Barbra Streisand's boyfriend, Bradley Cooper playing Jon Peters. Since he acts like an asshole, they flood his house and try to make an escape, but due to the gas crisis, run out of gas. Hoffman gets Haim a role as a hippie girl in a movie with Sean Penn, doing a riff on William Holden, directed by Tom Waits. She gets drunk, and the famous guys move onto drunken shenanigans, losing track of her. But Hoffman doesn't lose track of her. And so on.

They adventures are all set in a very specific time and place - early 70s, the Valley. They are often dramatic, but in the end, there are no consequences. Jon Peters never tries to get revenge. We don't find out if Haim made the movie. Hoffman gets arrested for murder, then immediately released when they catch the real guy. But that's sort of right for the time - nothing stuck, nothing mattered. It couldn't go on, and it didn't.

But it's really about out two main characters. Hoffman's playing an interesting riff on the kid from Rushmore. Full of himself, confident beyond his years, and with just enough talent to pull it off. Oh, and in love with an older woman too. 

Haim's character is a little different. You're bound to switch the genders and think about a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man, and go "eww". But that isn't as big a problem as you'd think. It's partly because Haim is played like she's closer to 18 than 25. She even claims to be 28, then correcting herself to 25. I wondered if she wasn't meant to be exaggerating that, but that didn't seem to be it. She wore the fashions of the day, like a corduroy minidress that read very "high school" to me. 

But it was mostly her aimlessness that gets her stuck in Hoffman's orbit. I almost wish the movie had been more about her, her life and dreams. But Anderson actually knew the Hoffman character, and had to imagine Haim's.

It's interesting that Ms. Spenser and I were coming of age right around this time. We got our licenses just in time for the gas crisis. But we're East Coasters, far, far from the Valley. Still, like Almost Famous and The Nice Guys, this movie hit our nostalgia buttons hard. I wonder what the kids (people under 60) think of it.