Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is a sun-soaked daydream of 1970s San Fernando Valley a film that captures the intoxicating, nonsensical whirl of youth with all its jagged edges left intact. This is not a coming-of-age story so much as a being-of-age one, where growth happens in sideways glances and half-realized ambitions rather than tidy epiphanies. Like its two leads Alana Haim’s restless, radiant Alana and Cooper Hoffman’s brash, boyish Gary Valentine the film stumbles, charms, frustrates, and ultimately seduces by refusing to play by anyone’s rules but its own.

The chemistry between Haim and Hoffman is the film’s beating heart. Their relationship defies easy categorization part friendship, part flirtation, part mutual exploitation and Anderson wisely lets it remain as messy and unresolved as adolescence itself. Haim, in her acting debut, is a revelation, all prickly vulnerability and unstudied magnetism. Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) channels his father’s knack for blending bravado with tenderness, but makes the role entirely his own.

Visually, the film basks in the golden-hour glow of nostalgia without succumbing to its usual lies. The Valley here is both playground and prison, a place of endless possibility and stifling smallness. Anderson’s camera lingers on the absurdity of the era waterbeds, pinball machines, a deranged Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters but never winks too hard. The film’s looseness is both its strength and its occasional weakness; some detours (a baffling interlude with Sean Penn as a washed-up actor) feel indulgent, while others (the infamous gas crisis sequence) achieve a kind of chaotic poetry.

Licorice Pizza doesn’t build to a climax so much as it evaporates, leaving behind the bittersweet aftertaste of a summer you can’t quite remember but can’t forget either. It’s flawed, uneven, and utterly alive a film that captures the glorious, stupid, fleeting magic of being young and convinced the world owes you something.