years on over a dinner-out beginning with “long time, no see.” Remember when we were delivering a water bed to Jon Peters and the truck ran out of gas and we had to drive down the hill backward?, one person might offer when the catching-up starts dulling. Or remember the time Alana had dinner with that famous actor Jack Holden and he did that motorcycle stunt in front of everyone at the bar over a pit of fire and he forgot she was on the back? Licorice Pizza feels more like a meandering series of episodes from a period TV show than it does a movie. (There’s no particular climax.) It’s a colorful mosaic all about forestalling monotonous adulthood and maintaining a semblance of youthful liberation for as long as possible. 

Anderson never elevates anything into wholeheartedly nostalgic fantasy. Darkness creeps under everything. The truck sequence is a lot scarier than it is totally funny; the inner miseries of the Peters and Holden approximations (played with demonic relish by Bradley Cooper and has-been sadness by Sean Penn, respectively) are tangibly felt enough to make being around them a little more depressingly bewildering than like being confronted with sentimentalized caricatures. The ruthlessness of the child-acting world of which Gary was at one time a dependable part is blunt. And when he starts his businesses you’re always waiting for everything to fall apart. 
 

Anderson pointedly inserts other things about the era we’d certainly rather not have back to further complicate the reverie. Some are well-realized, like the homosexuality the progressive mayoral candidate for whom Alana briefly volunteers (Benny Safdie) is forced to painstakingly hide to stay in the general public’s favor, or the influence the oil crisis has on the action. And some are not, like an unnecessarily recurring clunky joke involving a white businessman (John Michael Higgins) running a Japanese restaurant that talks to his apparent assembly line of Japanese wives in English with a mocking accent. Why make the point to address the era’s racism but code it as an off-color joke? 
 

The high spiritedness and high energy of Licorice Pizza’s many misadventures don’t always ensure the audience stays as electrified as the people going on them. A little in the Holden stretch, and a lot during the nonetheless fun Peters saga, I couldn’t completely escape into their nuttiness because there’s a fundamental and unshakable why-are-we-doing-this-ness to them. The movie is plainly striving to be a little unfocused, meant to evoke the simultaneously scary and exciting anything-could-happen energy of being young and still willing to do shit you won’t only a few years on. But Licorice Pizza’s quasi-vignettes increasingly struck me less like natural interruptions of can-you-believe-this-is-happening mania and more ways for Anderson to stretch out the film’s length to a reasonable runtime, and make real some cinematic doodles that have maybe been swirling around in his head for years hounding him for a way out. 
 

The doodles are more nurtured than the relationship partially giving them their reason for being after a while. Although we have a pretty good feel for this up-and-down unlikely friendship, I still longed somewhat for a simple extended scene or two with just Gary and Alana talking to each other forthrightly, seriously reflecting on the fears and desires that are for the most part only alluded to. As the movie wears on and the focus drifts more toward fun-to-talk-about hijinks, the characters can feel purely like catalysts for action. They become as decorative as Anderson’s handsomely rendered cultural signifiers.