Paul Thomas Ander­son takes us back in time with the Licorice Piz­za trailer

The first trail­er for Paul Thomas Ander­son​‘s new film Licorice Piz­za arrived online today amidst a wave of excite­ment, fol­low­ing lim­it­ed engage­ments in Lon­don, New York, and Los Ange­les cin­e­mas over the past cou­ple of weeks. What­ev­er advance word got out from those screen­ings, it couldn’t ful­ly con­vey the plea­sure of see­ing anoth­er vision from one of the Amer­i­can cinema’s most accom­plished and dis­tinc­tive artists.

The clip below some­what elu­ci­dates what’s been a hazy plot up to this point: Coop­er Hoff­man por­trays an up-and-com­ing young actor named Gary in ​’70s SoCal, seen here dur­ing a shoot before a live stu­dio audi­ence in which he has a play­ful pil­low fight with a gag­gle of kids. His days of audi­tions and nights of care­free teenage hooli­gan­ism even­tu­al­ly acquaint him with a girl played by Alana Haim, and they tum­ble head­long into a rocky romance that they’re both guar­an­teed to remem­ber forever.

A host of ter­tiary char­ac­ters pass through their heady sum­mer of love, includ­ing an old­er actor (Sean Penn) court­ing the affec­tions of Haim’s char­ac­ter, a boozy direc­tor (Tom Waits), an ambi­tious local politi­cian (Ben­ny Safdie), and unhinged pro­duc­er by the name of Jon Peters (Bradley Coop­er, por­tray­ing the real-life boyfriend of Bar­bra Streisand). They may come between our two leads, but that won’t stop her from pop­ping by Gary’s place to expose her­self and slap him when he asks to touch.

Bits and pieces of Anderson’s past films flit through this ear­ly impres­sion of his lat­est – the set­ting of Boo­gie Nights (the sound­track cut of David Bowie’s ​‘Life on Mars?’ clinch­es that much), the stoned nos­tal­gia of Inher­ent Vice, the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship dynam­ics of Phan­tom Thread. It looks like Licorice Piz­za will main­tain the some­what lighter tone of the past cou­ple fea­tures, mov­ing away from the tow­er­ing inten­si­ty of his ear­li­er work and into a phase char­ac­ter­ized by lost men infat­u­at­ed with dif­fi­cult-to-pin-down women.

Hav­ing for­gone the fes­ti­val cir­cuit, this film and Guiller­mo del Toro​’s Night­mare Alley rep­re­sent two of the biggest yet-to-be-seen releas­es left on this year’s movie cal­en­dar. You can be sure that once crit­ics have laid eyes on this one, every­one will know. The praise with Anderson’s movies is usu­al­ly hard to miss.

Licorice Piz­za comes to select US cin­e­mas on 26 Novem­ber, and then goes wide on 25 Decem­ber. The film will also come to the UK in 2021, though a date has yet to be set.