Licorice Pizza Tops Boogie Nights in PTA Debate

A recent critical essay by film writer Jesse Hassenger argues that Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 coming-of-age film, stands above Boogie Nights as the director’s finest achievement, even as he concedes that Boogie Nights remains a landmark in his career. Hassenger suggests that Licorice Pizza, with its warmth and informal mood, demonstrates a level of control and emotional nuance that surpasses the earlier film’s bravura showmanship. The piece positions Licorice Pizza not only as a tonal shift for Anderson but as a maturation of his craft reflected in a more lived-in atmosphere and a sharper sense of character timing.

Boogie Nights, Hassenger notes, is a portrait of the Los Angeles porn industry in the 1970s and ’80s—celebrated for its performances, its standout scenes, and its virtuoso tracking shots. He points to the opening sequence that washes the film’s title across a marquee, a nod to Scorsese’s Copacabana shot from Goodfellas, and to a broader pattern of long, roaming takes that sometimes make the characters feel like subjects moving through a designed panorama more than people with interior lives. The effect, in Hassenger’s view, is a movie that operates as a master class in cineaste technique, where the camera often seems to survey the world, and the people in it, as much as it observes them.

By contrast, Licorice Pizza is set in the San Fernando Valley of the mid-to-late 1970s, beginning a bit earlier in the pre-disco era and following the carefree, sometimes reckless misadventures of teenage actor-entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) alongside Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a directionless twentysomething who Gary falls for almost immediately. Hassenger describes Licorice Pizza as Anderson’s one outright comedy among the period pieces, yet insists it remains firmly ambitious and observant about the messy, unresolved terrain between youth and adulthood. The film’s mood—warm, playful, and lightly chaotic—masks a subtler inquiry into how people negotiate desire, ambition, and the small-compromise compromises that come with growing up. In this sense, Alana and Gary’s dynamic reads not as a simplistic romance but as a study of how two people at different life stages misread and reimagine what it means to be “real” in a world that often prizes traction over patience.

The relationship at the center of Licorice Pizza, the essay argues, carries an unusual tonal balance: it is funny and buoyant, yet it complicates the idea of maturity through its imperfect, almost body-swap sensibility. Alana’s attempts to connect with adult men repeatedly fall short, pushing her back toward the sanctuary of her family home while Gary, with the heedless energy of a boy who believes he can bend the world to his will, pursues the next instant of personal triumph. The result is a pair of characters whose foibles feel lived-in rather than schematic. Hassenger suggests that this is exactly where Licorice Pizza shows its strength: a patient, almost documentary-like patience with character, offset by a playful romantic misdirection that keeps the narrative buoyant rather than didactic.

Licorice Pizza also diverges from Boogie Nights in its sense of time. The film’s chronology is hazy—months, perhaps years, roll by with minimal explicit markers—yet the storytelling treats those leaps as ambient currency rather than obstacles to understanding. Alana’s ongoing quest to chart a path past her family’s orbit and Gary’s half-baked schemes to secure a foothold in the adult world form a counterpoint that helps the movie feel more exploratory than plotted. The result, Hassenger writes, is a film that feels like a composition built from mood and micro-moments rather than a map of dramatic milestones. The softer clock gives Licorice Pizza a dreamlike texture that, in his view, aligns with a broader maturation in Anderson’s voice since Boogie Nights.

A recurring thread in Hassenger’s comparison is a reckoning with Anderson’s tendencies as a filmmaker. The critic notes that PTA has at times leaned into diagrammatic storytelling, a trait that some observers associate with a certain rigidity of form. Licorice Pizza, he argues, loosens that grip without abandoning Anderson’s knack for precise, camera-driven storytelling. The film’s spontaneity—the way scenes unfurl with a looseness that lets emotion surface organically—feels, to Hassenger, less like deliberate choreography and more like an accumulation of authentic, small-scale discoveries. This shift, he contends, marks a maturation in Anderson’s style: a willingness to trust humor, tenderness, and ambiguity as engines of meaning rather than pure spectacle.

Some critics within the broader PTA conversation have suggested that Licorice Pizza benefits from the director’s additional decades of experience, enabling a more confident, less didactic approach than earlier works such as Boogie Nights or Punch-Drunk Love. Hassenger nevertheless emphasizes that the film’s distinct warmth and its willingness to linger on the imperfect, sometimes painful truths of late adolescence contribute to its sense of lived experience. The essay nods to analyses such as Nick Pinkerton’s discussion of Anderson’s diagrammatic tendencies, underscoring how Licorice Pizza’s freewheeling mood stands in deliberate contrast to those earlier, more formally structured modes.

Ultimately, Hassenger argues that neither Boogie Nights nor Licorice Pizza claims to be a direct autobiography for Anderson. Yet Licorice Pizza, with its inclusive, forgiving aura and its quietly stubborn interrogation of youth and adulthood, feels more lived-in to him. The piece invites viewers to reassess the director’s trajectory, suggesting that the warmth of Licorice Pizza does not merely make it more entertaining; it deepens its resonance by folding the complexities of growing up into a film that remains playful without losing sight of its serious undercurrents.

Jesse Hassenger is a Brooklyn-based writer who contributes regularly to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among other outlets. He also hosts podcasts on his own site and engages with fans and critics across the culture beat. His note arrives amid a broader, ongoing conversation about where Paul Thomas Anderson’s best work truly lies and how his later films have built on or diverged from the tonal and formal experiments of his earlier career.