Licorice Pizza

dir. Paul Thomas Anderson · 2021

Snapshot

Paul Thomas Anderson's eighth feature is a sun-drunk, picaresque love story set in the San Fernando Valley during the autumn and winter of 1973. Alana Kane (Alana Haim), twenty-five and adrift, and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), fifteen and relentlessly ambitious, orbit each other through a series of comic misadventures: a child acting agency, a pinball machine business, a waterbed company, a run-in with a volatile producer, a brushfire at a gas station during the oil embargo. The film resists conventional romantic structure—its climax is a sprint across a darkened parking lot, not a declaration—and trusts in the electricity of its two débuting leads. Named after a chain of Southern California record stores, the title never appears in the film itself; it functions instead as an evocation of a particular cultural atmosphere, a smell and a sound more than a plot.

Industry & production

Licorice Pizza was produced by Anderson's production company, Ghoulardi Film Company (named for the late-night Cleveland horror host Ernie Anderson, father of Wes Anderson's frequent collaborator), with MGM and United Artists Releasing handling North American distribution. The budget has been reported in the range of forty million dollars, though Anderson and his producers have not confirmed precise figures publicly.

The screenplay drew substantially on stories shared with Anderson by Gary Goetzman, the producer best known for his long collaboration with Jonathan Demme on Philadelphia (1993) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Goetzman grew up in the San Fernando Valley as a child actor turned juvenile entrepreneur—precisely the trajectory the fictional Gary Valentine follows—and his anecdotes provided the episodic spine of the script. Anderson has acknowledged the debt while stressing that the film is not biography; the characters are composites and inventions laid over a geography and an era that Anderson himself inhabited as a boy, having grown up in Studio City.

Casting proceeded unconventionally on both lead roles. Alana Haim, a member of the pop-rock trio HAIM, had appeared in Anderson's music videos for the band and was offered the role directly; she had no prior feature film experience. Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, was seventeen at the time of production and likewise making his feature début. Both were cast against the grain of professional polish—a conscious decision that echoes Anderson's interest, across his career, in non-actors or actors deployed against type. The supporting ensemble includes Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper, whose cameo as the volatile film producer Jon Peters generated particular attention and some controversy; John Michael Higgins plays a restaurateur whose scenes drew criticism for their use of exaggerated mock-Japanese accents as a comedic device.

Principal photography took place almost entirely in the San Fernando Valley, with production making extensive use of practical locations—storefronts, residential streets, bowling alleys, and hillside roads that retain their 1970s character. The film shot in 2020 and 2021 under modified COVID-era protocols, a circumstance that, unusually, left little visible mark on the final cut.

Technology

Anderson shot Licorice Pizza on 35mm film, an unbroken commitment since Boogie Nights (1997). The choice is aesthetic rather than nostalgic on principle: the grain structure, contrast response, and color latitude of photochemical film suit Anderson's interest in the quality of light specific to the Valley—smoggy, warm, saturating late-afternoon sun. The film was shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which allowed for compositions that breathe without the formal weight of anamorphic scope; this distinguishes the film's texture from Boogie Nights or Inherent Vice, both shot in anamorphic widescreen. Post-production involved a photochemical intermediate before digital color grading, preserving the grain structure through the pipeline.

Technique

Cinematography

The director of photography was Michael Bauman, who had worked with Anderson in camera department capacities on previous productions before ascending to the lead DP role here. The visual approach favors handheld or loosely stabilized long-lens work: the camera follows characters at a slight remove, catching them in motion rather than pinning them in static compositions. The effect is documentary-adjacent—the film often feels observed rather than arranged. Daylight interiors are lit with practical sources augmented to mimic afternoon sun flooding through windows. Night exteriors, including the film's several pivotal running sequences, lean into available light and the warm sodium-vapor glow of 1970s street lighting, producing images that feel simultaneously vivid and slightly degraded in the manner of period Super 8 or 16mm home footage.

Editing

Anderson's longtime editor Andy Jurgensen, who has cut the director's work since Inherent Vice (2014), assembled a film of roughly two hours and thirteen minutes from what was reportedly a great deal of footage. The editing grammar is largely classical—cuts within scenes are motivated by dialogue and eyeline—but the between-scene transitions are often abrupt, even jarring, as if catching the characters mid-stride. The episodic structure encourages a segmented rhythm: discrete adventures follow one another with minimal connective tissue, and the film trusts the audience to project continuity across temporal ellipses.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Anderson stages Licorice Pizza with a freedom that recalls the improvisational warmth of Hal Ashby and Jonathan Demme rather than the rigorous geometric formalism of his own earlier work. Scenes frequently run long, allowing actors to find their moments without the pressure of a tightly planned camera program. The famous closing run—Gary and Alana sprinting toward each other through the dark across a parking lot, shot with a telephoto lens that compresses space and makes their approach feel endless—is among the most discussed sequences in recent American cinema, and illustrates Anderson's ability to extract emotional magnitude from a simple, unadorned physical action.

The production design (by Florencia Martin) integrates period-accurate objects—wallpaper patterns, vehicle models, furniture, appliances—without the hermetic perfection that often makes period films feel embalmed. Spaces look lived in; the Valley's working-class and lower-middle-class homes and businesses are rendered without either condescension or nostalgia's falsifying gloss.

Sound

The sound design operates in close collaboration with the music supervision, creating a world where diegetic and non-diegetic music are often porous. A David Bowie song erupts without warning; a period pop record bleeds from a car radio into the scene's ambient space. Jonny Greenwood, who has scored every Anderson film since There Will Be Blood (2007), provided original music here, though the film leans more heavily than any of their previous collaborations on a curated selection of early-1970s source recordings. Greenwood's orchestral contributions are woven into rather than set against the period music, and the overall sonic texture privileges the warm, slightly distorted sound of vinyl—another formal rhyme with the record-store world the title invokes.

Performance

The film's central gamble is its leads, and both Haim and Hoffman meet it. Haim plays Alana with a specific combination of exasperation, vulnerability, and unfocused longing that feels genuinely found rather than performed; she moves as a non-actor does, slightly off the theatrical beat, which gives her reactions an authenticity that professional polish might have smoothed away. Hoffman carries a remarkable physical confidence—his walk, his posture, his easy command of a room—that makes Gary's entrepreneurial audacity credible even at fifteen. Neither performance depends on technical virtuosity; both depend on presence. Anderson's work with actors throughout his career has shown consistent preference for performers who inhabit rather than construct, and Licorice Pizza is perhaps the purest expression of that method.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's structure is episodic and picaresque rather than goal-driven. There is no single objective that organizes the plot; Gary and Alana are not trying to do one thing but are instead caught up in a series of doing many things, each of which briefly preoccupies the film before giving way to the next. This is consistent with the phenomenology of adolescence and young adulthood—life experienced as a sequence of vivid incidents rather than a teleological arc. The central romantic tension is similarly diffuse: Gary is explicitly smitten; Alana resists, deflects, pursues other men, circles back. Their relationship is never consummated on screen, and the film ends at the moment of mutual recognition rather than at any conventional resolution. The mode is essentially comic, in the deep sense—a comedy of embarrassment, desire, and the social grotesque—with sporadic passages of genuine danger (the film's gas-station fire sequence) that remind the audience the world of 1973 was not entirely soft.

Genre & cycle

Licorice Pizza belongs most immediately to the coming-of-age comedy, a genre with deep roots in American cinema. It participates in a specific sub-cycle of nostalgia films that reconstruct particular American decades through the lens of adolescent or young adult experience: the tradition runs from Lucas's American Graffiti (1973, also set in the early 1970s) through Dazed and Confused (1993), Almost Famous (2000), and beyond. The film is also legible as a romantic comedy, though it deliberately frustrates the genre's conventions of consummation and declaration. Its period setting places it within the broader cycle of 1970s-revival films, though Anderson is unusual in that his investment in the decade is autobiographical and local rather than generically motivated.

Authorship & method

Anderson wrote and directed without co-writers, continuing his practice of solo screenplay authorship. His method involves long preparation—extensive location scouting, period research, accumulation of anecdote and detail—before production, after which he allows significant latitude on set. He operates camera himself on occasion, and his proximity to the image-making process shapes the visual intimacy of his films. His collaboration with Jonny Greenwood, now spanning six features, has become one of the most significant director-composer partnerships in contemporary American cinema; Greenwood's ability to modulate between dissonance and lyricism maps onto Anderson's tonal range.

Michael Bauman's contribution as DP represents a generational handoff from Anderson's long partnership with Robert Elswit (who shot Boogie Nights through There Will Be Blood) and the single-film experiment of Phantom Thread, on which Anderson served as his own cinematographer. Bauman's approach on Licorice Pizza prioritizes mobility and light sensitivity over compositional control, a shift that suits the film's improvisational register.

Movement / national cinema

Anderson occupies a specific position in American cinema: a filmmaker who emerged from the 1990s independent wave but has consistently worked at the intersection of studio resources and auteur prerogative. Licorice Pizza is an American studio film in the traditional sense—made with significant capital, distributed by a major—but is controlled entirely by Anderson's creative vision in a manner more characteristic of European art cinema. The film belongs to no formal school or movement; its closest kinship is with the generation of American humanist filmmakers working in the 1970s and early 1980s—Ashby, Demme, Cassavetes—whose work Anderson has repeatedly cited as foundational.

Era / period

The film is set in the autumn and winter of 1973, during the OPEC oil embargo. The embargo is woven into the plot: the gas shortage and the resulting scenes of violence and chaos at filling stations function both as period texture and as a reminder that the era's apparent freedom was shadowed by resource anxiety and political turbulence. Anderson locates the film's events against this background without making it didactic; the embargo is experienced as circumstance, not symbol.

Themes

The film's central concern is the peculiar asymmetry of desire and readiness: Gary wants Alana completely and immediately; Alana wants something she cannot yet name. Their ten-year age gap is treated as a source of comedy and pathos simultaneously—he is precocious, she is underachieving, and neither is quite where they should be given their age. The Valley itself is thematic: a peripheral geography where ambitions form and circulate at a slight remove from the cultural centers of Los Angeles, a place where a fifteen-year-old can plausibly run a pinball machine business and a twenty-five-year-old can feel genuinely outpaced. California dreaming here is not debunked but refracted—the dreams are achievable, slightly absurd, and specific to a moment that is already passing.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception. Licorice Pizza received strongly positive reviews on its limited release in late November 2021 and wide release in December. Critics praised the performances of Haim and Hoffman, the period detail, and Anderson's tonal command. Some dissenting voices noted the film's loose narrative as a structural weakness, and the scenes involving Higgins's character drew pointed criticism as racially insensitive caricature—a charge that generated sustained discussion about the film's ethical blind spots. The film received three nominations at the 94th Academy Awards (2022): Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay; it did not win in any category.

Influences on the film. The most direct antecedent is American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), with which Licorice Pizza shares its episodic structure, period setting, and investment in the social world of California youth. Hal Ashby's cinema—Harold and Maude (1971) for its unconventional romance across an age gap; Shampoo (1975) for its Valley milieu and restless sexual energy; The Last Detail (1973) for its picaresque momentum—is an evident touchstone. Jonathan Demme's warmth and his use of non-actors and musicians as screen presences (notably in Something Wild, 1986) inform Anderson's approach to his leads. Robert Altman's overlapping naturalism and his willingness to let scenes expand beyond their functional necessity are felt throughout. Anderson's own Boogie Nights (1997), set in the same geography a few years later, forms an implicit prequel in mood and milieu.

Legacy and forward influence. The film's legacy is still forming, given its recency, but several lines are already visible. Haim's performance ignited renewed critical discussion about the casting of musicians in dramatic roles—a practice as old as cinema but given fresh impetus by the conviction of her work here. The film has been frequently cited in subsequent debates about nostalgia in American cinema: as an example of how period recreation can serve emotional interiority rather than mere spectacle. Anderson's refusal of resolution—his willingness to end on potential rather than arrival—has been noted as a model for romantic narrative that honors ambiguity. Cooper Hoffman's début, carrying with it the weight of his father's legacy, was received with particular critical generosity, and his subsequent career will be tracked closely as a result.