Movie Review: Licorice Pizza

Now this movie, unlike Hesher, I had heard about before. 

Yet, this was not the movie I had expected. Somehow, the trailers all felt a bit misleading. For one, Bradley Cooper figured to have a pretty big role in this movie, based upon the trailers. His character, however, is not an especially big one, and he is on the screen for maybe five or ten minutes, tops.

Also, I somehow got the impression that this was almost a documentary on the early days of Barbara Streisand. I kept expecting her life story to show up. Spoiler alter: it really doesn't. She is mentioned, but almost in passing. Again, the trailers seemed to me to suggest something in this movie, or that this movie is about, which felt a bit misleading.

And yet, I am not unhappy about it. In fact, it was rather pleasing that this movie had almost nothing to do with her, or about anything that I imagined, in fact. Nor was I upset that Cooper's character was not in this movie more, since his was likely the least likeable character in it.

No, this movie was not what I was expecting. And as such, paradoxically, it in fact delivered more than I expected it to.

It clearly takes place in a different era: either the late 1960's or, more likely, the early 1970's. The Vietnam conflict is still raging, and Nixon is in the White House. Hippies are still around.  

Alana Kane (played by Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (played by Cooper Hoffman) are the two main characters, and they play almost reluctant lovers. Both of them kind of lash out at the other in different ways, with varying degrees of subtlety. And they both manage to do this with reactions that went beyond even what they likely expected and perhaps wanted.

This is a good movie overall. It has a distinct feel of documenting another era quite accurately, so that it legitimately feels like this is the early 1970's, at least for as long as you are immersed in the movie. And you know what? The story moves well with it. You care about the two main characters in particular, and the movie does a good job in conveying what the characters are going through.

Valentine reminded me a lot of Philip Seymour Hoffman, to the point where it felt uncanny. Then while writing this review, I did a tiny bit of research, and what I found made a lot of sense. This is Hoffman's son, so that went a long way towards explaining all of this. The similarities not make a lot of sense but, in fact, feel inevitable given all of this. If anything, it adds to the movie.. 

Overall, a pretty decent movie. This one is good for most audiences, and might be especially appealing to people who long to revisit the seemingly more innocent days of  nearly half a century ago now.