133 min | R | November 26, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
A teenage hustler and a stalled twenty-five-year-old meet on picture day in the 1973 San Fernando Valley and spend the whole film circling each other. Waterbeds, pinball, and one terrifying Bradley Cooper cameo follow. Paul Thomas Anderson turns a string of bad schemes into the best film about being stuck that you will see.
Gary Valentine is a fifteen-year-old child actor and serial hustler working the San Fernando Valley in 1973. Alana Kane is twenty-five and stuck, drifting through a job she hates and a family that smothers her. They meet on school picture day and circle each other for the rest of the film. Paul Thomas Anderson builds the movie out of waterbeds, pinball arcades, and failed schemes, but the real subject is the gap between them. Gary moves with the confidence of a man who has not yet learned he can fail. Alana has learned it and cannot stop measuring herself against a boy who has not.
Cooper Hoffman plays Gary as a born salesman who treats every room as a market to close. He is brash without being unbelievable, and Hoffman finds the loneliness underneath the swagger. Alana Haim plays Alana as a coil of frustration and want, sharp-tongued one minute and reckless the next. She drives a truck backward down a hill with the engine dead and makes it the most alive moment in the film. Sean Penn turns Jack Holden into a washed-up actor performing his own legend, and Bradley Cooper plays producer Jon Peters as a tornado of menace and vanity who blows through one extended sequence and detonates it.
Anderson writes and directs with a structure that refuses traditional plot. The film moves in episodes, each one a self-contained errand or disaster, and he edits them so the connective tissue is feeling rather than incident. He shoots on 35mm with cinematographer Michael Bauman, and the grain and warm light make 1973 feel handled rather than recreated. The camera loves to run, tracking Gary and Alana as they sprint through parking lots and down sidewalks, and Anderson lets these dashes go long enough to become the emotional spine of the picture. He scores the chaos with period needle drops and Jonny Greenwood’s restraint, then trusts silence when a scene needs it.
This is a film about being young enough to believe the next scheme will work and old enough to know it will not. Anderson does not punish his characters for their bad ideas or sand the rough edges off the era they live in. He lets the comedy run loose and the longing sit underneath it. The two leads carry material that would collapse with weaker actors, and they make a strange courtship feel inevitable. The film ends where it has to, and it earns the run to get there.