When that idea goes south, they team with some of Gary’s schoolmates to start a business selling and delivering the latest in sleazy Los Angeles sophistication: waterbeds. When Gary, a part-time working actor with a busy single mother, needs an adult chaperone to travel to a publicity appearance in New York, he convinces Alana to accompany him as his “guardian.” Later they try unsuccessfully to launch her in her own acting career, with Gary as her enthusiastic if less than knowledgeable coach. Though she laughs off his clumsy attempts at flirtation, the two soon establish a prickly, competitive bond that’s somewhere between friendship and business partnership. To the instantly smitten Gary, and to the audience, she seems like a movie star in the making.

Alana, who is working as the assistant to a school portrait photographer, is sharp-witted, sardonic, and ambitious without quite knowing yet what she wants to be. From the moment Alana first appears, resplendent in a miniskirt and wedge sandals, in the breezeway of Gary’s San Fernando Valley high school, she radiates a winning mix of cocky bravado and goofy vulnerability. The other half of the May/late-June pairing at the heart of Licorice Pizza (she is 25 to his 15) is Alana Kane, the fictional alter ego of the singer Alana Haim. No one is fonder of a small-time wheeler-dealer than Paul Thomas Anderson, and Gary’s last name is “Valentine” for a reason: the man behind the camera clearly loves this brashly self-confident boy, not least because the actor playing him is the 18-year-old son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s longtime collaborator and close friend. His father, who died in 1997, was an ABC voiceover announcer and the former host of a block of local late-night horror-movie programming, the kind of merry-prankster figure who pops up again and again in his son’s California-set work.

And like Licorice Pizza’s teen hero Gary (Cooper Hoffman), Anderson also grew up on the fringes of the entertainment industry. Like Goetzman, Anderson grew up in Southern California, with his high-school years coming about a decade after the early-’70s era when this film is set.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth feature, the amiably shambolic Licorice Pizza, feels like the most autobiographical film the 51-year-old writer-director has made to date, even if the script was based on someone else’s memories: namely, those of the child actor turned successful producer Gary Goetzman, whose stories Anderson heard while they were both working for the late maestro Jonathan Demme.

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