Anderson crafts an offbeat love story that manages to be sweet, hilarious, absurd – and wholly believable
There’s something propulsively intoxicating about the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. Watching Punch-Drunk Love left me in exactly the state described by the title; Inherent Vice demanded to be inhaled rather than watched; I wanted to wrap myself in the poisonous couture of Phantom Thread. Anderson’s latest takes its title from a hip record store (reportedly named after an Abbott and Costello gag), and appropriately enough the result spun me round like a record. This is heady stuff, an evocation of the San Fernando valley in the early 70s, as personally nostalgic as George Lucas’s American Graffiti, albeit with an insanely adventurous edge.
Screen newcomer Cooper Hoffman (son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) is Gary Valentine, a high-schooler with a Brian Wilson haircut who’s also a child actor and go-getting entrepreneur. “Where are your parents while all this is happening?” asks Alana (musician and feature first-timer Alana Haim), the twentysomething Gary meets when she’s working as an assistant to the school photographer, and whom he declares to be “the girl I’m going to marry one day”, despite her insistence that “we are not boyfriend and girlfriend”.