A Sweet Comedy from . . . Paul Thomas Anderson?

F or years, I’ve been hoping that Paul Thomas Anderson would turn away from art-house auteur fare, with its shapeless storylines, twisted, homicidal characters, and exasperating ambiguity. If only he would apply his talents to a standard Hollywood genre picture, I thought.

And now he’s done so. Sort of. Picture PTA directing Fast Times at Ridgemont High and you’ll grasp the vibe of Licorice Pizza, a sweet 90-minute romcom about young people in the early-1970s San Fernando Valley that also balloons out to include 45 minutes of interspersed riffing on various SoCal oddballs the youngsters meet while they’re trying to decide whether to start a romance.

The last time PTA strayed into this territory, with Punch-Drunk Love (2002), the upshot was something like an anti-romcom, or a disquisition on the mechanics of the romcom. But Licorice Pizza is much more conventional, much more pleasing, and much less obstreperous. It even delivers — I can hardly believe I’m typing these words about a PTA film — a big, satisfying smile at the end.

Licorice Pizza (the name of a Seventies Southern California record-store chain, although the film doesn’t tell us this) capitalizes beautifully on two wonderful screen debuts by its leads.

Cooper Hoffman — the 18-year-old son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose first knockout role was in Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) — isn’t conventionally handsome, and yet you can neither take your eyes off him nor stop rooting for him. He’s absolutely perfect as a 15-year-old high-school student named Gary Valentine who opens the movie by pestering a 25-year-old photographer’s assistant he meets while waiting in line for his yearbook photo.

The assistant, Alana Kane, is played with low-key appeal by another rookie actor, Alana Haim, who has already had success as a musician with her sisters in the group Haim, for whom Anderson has directed music videos. Gary charm-strafes Alana in a long, long opening sequence that reminded me of Robert De Niro inexhaustibly pitching woo at Liza Minnelli in New York, New York, then boasts to his little brother that he’s met the girl he’s going to marry. This seems optimistic: She’s ten years older. Although it’d be illegal for them to have a relationship, that’s not the real barrier to their romance, since it’s the Seventies. She just thinks dating a high-school kid would be hopelessly uncool.

He pursues, and she demurs: a classic romcom snag. She intermittently slaps him in the chops or walks away or flirts with other guys, but she also keeps hanging around him. Who wouldn’t? The kid’s got something. He’s going places.

Such as to New York, to which he schemes to bring her as his supposed chaperone for an acting gig involving backup work for a Lucille Ball stand-in (Christine Ebersole). On the trip, though, to his horror, she attracts the attention of a slightly older and cooler actor (Skyler Gisondo). This rival has the perfectly Seventies name of Lance, and a very Lance-y haircut to go with it. As you’d expect from a PTA film, the hair, costumes and production design are a feast.

But the impeccable details wouldn’t matter very much if there was no heart underneath them. The way Gary and Alana bicker and try to make each other jealous proves endlessly endearing: Why can’t these two see they’re perfect for each other? Anderson sends them on a nutty journey, having them sell waterbeds one day and meet a casting agent the next. She scores an audition with “Jack” Holden, who is clearly a spoof of William Holden, pulled off with gusto by Sean Penn in one of several crazy, unpredictable interludes. Another is an encounter with the hairdresser-turned-film-producer Jon Peters, hilariously played in an extended cameo by Bradley Cooper, who behaves like a distinctly menacing Bee Gee. “You know how much tail I get?” he asks. “All of it. It’s all mine.” His appearance sprays comic voltage in all directions in much the same way as the “Sister Christian” scene near the end of Boogie Nights.

Licorice Pizza goes off on so many such kooky digressions that it feels like listening to stories told by an old friend (and it was, in fact, inspired by the misadventures of Anderson’s pal Gary Goetzman, who was once a child actor and Peters’s waterbed salesman and is today Tom Hanks’s producing partner). There’s a strange murder subplot that comes and goes in a few minutes (don’t worry, nobody gets beaten to death with a bowling pin or anything), a peek into the mayoral campaign of a secretive city councilman (Benny Safdie), and a joyous ode to the return of pinball machines to Los Angeles in 1974, 35 years after they’d been banned.

As is the rule with PTA movies, the writer-director is in no hurry to get any place in particular, but though the movie feels too long — When do his movies ever not? — it’s hard to identify what scenes could be cut: They’re all adorable or funny or touching or at least interesting. For a guy who likes to make overbearing three-hour movies about extravagantly damaged people, Anderson has a genius for locating the comedy in the ordinary, and his wry observations make Licorice Pizza one of the funniest movies of the year. Maybe he should ditch the epics for a while and dare to be delightful.