I was excited to see Licorice Pizza, the new movie set in Director John Paul Anderson’s native San Fernando Valley in the mid-1970s, and is partly autobiographical.

The movie got terrific reviews when it opened in theaters in late December (it’s in theaters now, no streaming yet). Reviews called it brilliant; the New Yorker Magazine said it was brave, honest, and “thrilling.” Other reviews said the movie was “stunning,”  an “instant classic.”

A British film critic did call it “a meandering trip beneath the California sun.”

I was psyched to see this movie and waited for it to come to a local theater. When it showed up this week, I jumped.

I was disappointed, almost from the first.

I had the feeling Anderson had over-directed this movie, hiring so many actors and covering so many disjointed scenes and arguments that he just couldn’t put all the pieces together in a way that made much sense. It was so much more complicated and circular than it needed to be.

I’ll warn you that I’m in something of a minority on this, which is fine by me, but of course, you might want to see the movie to make up your mind, always a good idea.

I thought it was a dizzying and out-of-control mess.

I’m not sure I can even tell you what it’s supposed to be about? Romance? Non-Romance? Love? The 70’s. Nasty and cruel  Hollywood memories and people?

The movie presents itself as a ferociously and relentlessly romantic coming-of-age story for a teenage actor (Gary, played by the gifted Cooper Hoffman, son of the late and sorely missed Philip Seymour Hoffman) and self-styled hustler and a 28-year-old dreamer (Alana) played by Alana Haim.

She was terrific in the film, the dawdling was not her fault.

Anderson’s real subject and target here struck me as Hollywood itself, which came under brutal assault. from Anderson. He had a lot to get off his chest.

Gary meets Alana when she’s working for a school photographer and bumps into him and starts cursing (she never stops.)

She is bitter, lost, angry and combative.  She’ll fight with a tree stump if it gets in her way.

She lives at home with her parents and two sisters and her very devout Jewish and anxious parents.

At one point, Alana demands to know from a boyfriend who declared himself an atheist to her shocked father what his penis looks like. When the bewildered boy relents under her battering, he says he was circumcised, and  she screams, “Then you are a fucking Jew!”

What?

This outburst seemed designed to get rid of the boyfriend and return to Gary. Gary pleaded for the first hour of the movie to see Alana’s breasts, and when he finally saw them, he asked if he could touch them, and she slapped him in the face and stormed out the door.

He never got all the way.

The differences between Alana and Gary in temperament, emotions, and politics are enormous, and at first, she won’t’ even consider dating him or even knowing him, which made perfect sense.

When they did get together,  I was rooting for them to split up.

There is from the first a mysterious, totally unexplained, and seemingly incomprehensible emotional connection, mostly asexual (they never have sex in the movie) between the two. Nor do they ever talk about it.

Gary is living at home with his mother, who he says works for him, but who never utters a coherent or relevant or concerned, or revealing sentence in the whole movie, even as her son blows up his life and acts like a jerk again and again.

During the film, Alena and Gary constantly switch careers, jobs, and lovers. One is continually running through the streets to find the other. Sadly, they do.

I’ve never really seen a romance like this in a movie.

Mostly, and in between their rare moments of connection, Gary and Alana insult, betray, undercut and run away from one another for two long hours. I give Gary credit, no jury would have convicted him for strangling her, but he never let go. Neither did she.

Of course, I won’t reveal the ending other than to say it made no sense to me. I couldn’t give it away if I wanted to.

The movie is schizophrenic, in part a tangled, back-and-forth, hard to fathom lurching and wounding that hovers over this agonizing romance and Anderson’s loathing of Hollywood and its history and values.

It should have been a great movie, as many critics seem to think it was, but I couldn’t find the greatness in it.

Will these two ever simply accept the other or walk away, I wondered? Hmmm…no.

The crapping on Hollywood never stopped.

I’m sure Anderson wanted to show his independence and moral superiority, but he did the impossible; he had me sympathizing with the era of the Hollywood studios.

The movie has a Lucile Ball Character who’s a raging monster and strange appearances by Sean Penn (invoking a William-Holden type actor named “Holden” and Bradley Cooper, who plays a deranged Jon Peters, Barbara Streisand’s lover and boyfriend turned Hollywood producer. (Peters is still alive and working as a producer.)

I can’t imagine any earthly reason why Peters or Holden were acting in a coming-of-age romance set in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles.

And why pick on poor William Holden, an actor almost nobody under 60 has ever heard of?

Peters is hardly a historic Hollywood figure. Nor was his presence in the movie ever explained. It felt like two different movies had just been inserted to get Penn and Cooper a role in the film.

I’m sure these two famous actors had fun appearing in the movie,  but they had absolutely nothing to do with the storyline.

They also interrupted the film’s narrative and overshadowed the real stars,  Haim and Cooper.

At one point in this intense and dizzying movie, Gary and Alana and Gary’s very young child schoolboy posse, who hang out with him throughout the film, and who hardly ever speak but do look cute at times, help Alana and Gary trash Peter’s house with a leaking water hose and smash his expensive car with a baseball bat.

Gary has suddenly, and  unaccountable quit acting to sell waterbeds and brings one to Peter’s house before leaving the water to run (this movie Peters has threatened to kill Gary’s family if they mess up his house, which they promptly do.)

This vandalism is supposed to be gripping, but it just looked loopy to me.

I think the idea here was to show the flag of defiance against Hollywood’s self-serving and self-aggrandizing mythology. But it just looked like adolescent stupidity to me.

Anderson was going for the throat here; it seemed this was the movie’s real point. Hollywood, like Army Generals (have you ever seen a nice one in a Hollywood movie?), is just too easy a target these days, especially as the film industry is going to pieces under an avalanche of streaming that is drowning the big studios.

We get that there are phonies and hustlers and creeps in Hollywood history. I know this story by heart.

Robert Altman did this much better in his brilliant and scathing Hollywood movie The Player.

Anderson is beating a dead horse here. It might thrill movie critics, but it left me in the dust.

. If you don’t live in Hollywood, who cares by now?

The romance between Gary and Alana was much more promising, and these two are excellent actors. It wasn’t clear why Anderson stuck in this revisionist Hollywood history into a movie that was, at times, charming, warm, and touching.

The movie is not violent, and children can see it, although they are likely to be bored and confused. The good news: there isn’t a single explosion in it.

Sore Ass Meter: 5. This movie is way too long at two hours and 13 minutes, and I had a sore ass at the end. The scale goes from 1 (no sore ass) to five (a very sore ass.)