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    The Breakout Stars of 2021

    In a year that offered glimmers of hope across the world of arts, these performers and creators rose to the occasion.Olivia Rodrigo, members of the cast of “Reservation Dogs” and a scene from “Sanctuary City.”Clockwise from left: Mat Hayward/Getty Images; jeremy Dennis for The New York Times; Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe cultural world began to sputter back to life this year, and in turn, so did many of us — slipping out of our sweats and into movie theaters, clubs and Broadway shows. Even for those who were less confident rubbing (or bumping) elbows in public, artists brought us plenty of joy in the safety of our home. It may not have been the beforetimes, but in 2021, these artists and creators from across the arts gave us a fresh outlook.Pop MusicOlivia RodrigoFor those of us over 30, Olivia Rodrigo seemed to come out of nowhere with her colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” a heartbreak ballad that dropped in January and stayed at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks. But for a younger audience, Rodrigo, 18, was familiar from her time as a Disney child star. Despite that pedigree, she didn’t drag along a squeaky clean image.Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic at The New York Times, called “Sour,” her debut album from May, “nuanced and often exceptional,” deploying “sweet pop and tart punk equally well.” He called Rodrigo, a California-raised Filipino American, “an optimal pop star for the era of personalities, subpersonalities and metapersonalities.”As Rodrigo told GQ magazine in June, “Something that I learned very early on is the importance of separating person versus persona. When people who don’t know me are criticizing me, they’re criticizing my persona, not my person.”Olivia Rodrigo’s colossal debut single, “Drivers License,” stayed at the top of the charts.Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IheartmediaTelevisionLee Jung-jaeBlood-drenched, brutally violent entertainment is rarely synonymous with nuanced, complex performances. But in Netflix’s “Squid Game,” a dystopian thriller from South Korea that became a global streaming sensation, Lee Jung-jae, 49, pulled off just that. As the protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a gambling addict who is deeply in debt, he gives a wrenching and surprisingly subtle performance as he battles his way through unspeakable horrors.But Lee, a model-turned-actor who has starred in several hit Korean films like last year’s gangster drama “Deliver Us From Evil,” doesn’t play Gi-hun as a hero or a villain, a bumbling fool or a savvy con man. “Gi-hun’s emotions are very complicated,” Lee told The Times in October.“Squid Game,” he went on, “is not really a show about survival games. It’s about people.”TheaterThe Authors of ‘Six’In October, “Six” became the first musical to have its opening night on Broadway since the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. An exuberant and cheeky pop musical about the wives of Henry VIII, it brought much-needed fun and noise to the stage — thanks to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who wrote the book, music and lyrics. (Moss also directed the show with Jamie Armitage.)The hit show is “a rollicking, reverberant blast from the past” that “turns Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives into spunky modern-day pop stars,” as Jesse Green, the theater critic at The Times, and Maya Phillips, a critic-at-large, put it. Think Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, whom the leading divas were in some ways modeled after.Marlow came up with the idea for “Six” while daydreaming during a poetry class at Cambridge University, where he and Moss, now both 27, became fast friends. “This,” Moss told The Times in 2019, “is obviously the craziest thing that’s ever happened to us.”MoviesAunjanue EllisIn 1995, The Times called Aunjanue Ellis an up-and-comer for her role in the Shakespeare Festival production of “The Tempest” in Central Park. Ellis “projects nearly as much force offstage as she does in character as Ariel,” the article read. That fire hasn’t wavered in the years since, whether on film —“Ray,” “The Help,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” — or on TV in “When They See Us” and “Lovecraft Country,” both of which earned her Emmy nominations.Now, in the movie “King Richard,” Ellis delivers a megawatt performance as Oracene, the mother of Venus and Serena Williams (opposite Will Smith as Richard) — turning a supporting role into a talker and generating Oscar buzz.In an interview this fall, Ellis, now 52, talked about what makes her say yes to a role: “Can I do it and not be embarrassed and stand by the fact that I’ve done it?” she says she asks herself. “Is it fun to play and am I doing a service to Black women?”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Classical MusicEun Sun Kim“An artist is never satisfied,” said Eun Sun Kim after the San Francisco Opera’s production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” on Oct. 14 — despite an extended ovation and shouts of “Bravo!” from the audience.After all, Kim — the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States and the first Asian to take on such a role, a monumental appointment that became official in August — has a lot on her plate. Not only is she grappling with the company’s financial fallout from the pandemic, she inherited the opera’s previous problems, like declining attendance.“It’s a hard job, it’s a big job, whether you’re a woman or a man,” she told The Times in October. “I want to be seen just as a conductor.”Kim, 41, whose conducting debut in the states was in 2017 with the Houston Grand Opera production of “La Traviata,” is aiming to broaden the art form’s appeal in the digital age. The company hopes her appointment will do the same; there were advertisements featuring her image with the words “A new era begins” around the city.“Opera is not boring or old,” she said in October. “It’s the same human beings, the same stories, whether it was 200 years ago or nowadays.”Eun Sun Kim, the first female music director of a major opera company in the United States, at the San Francisco Opera in October.Kelsey McClellan for The New York TimesArtJennifer PackerLast year, Jennifer Packer, 37, a painter who depicts contemporary Black life through atmospheric portraits and still lifes, told The Times that she’s driven by thoughts of “emotional and moral buoyancy in the face of various kinds of impoverishment and de facto captivity.”Now, that perspective is on display in her biggest solo exhibition, “The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show includes about 30 of her works from the past decade, including the painting “A Lesson in Longing,” which was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial — as well as works that speak to Black lives lost to police brutality. Her largest painting, “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!),” referring to Breonna Taylor, was created during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.In reviewing Packer’s Whitney exhibition for The Times, Aruna D’Souza wrote that no other artist right now is doing as much as Packer “to make those who have been rendered invisible — on museum walls, in public culture, in political discourse — visible.”MoviesCooper HoffmanIn “Licorice Pizza,” the new comedy-drama-romance from Paul Thomas Anderson, Cooper Hoffman plays an unlikely teenage hero. Cooper, 18, is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s muse before the actor’s death in 2014. Before this movie, Hoffman had never really acted, except with Anderson in something akin to home movies, he said during a press event in November. “It was on a very lower scale, with an iPhone and his kid,” Hoffman joked, referring to Anderson’s child. “I would always play the bad guy, and his kid would beat me up, and it was good fun.”In her review of the film, Manohla Dargis, co-chief movie critic at The Times, said that Anderson’s love for Cooper’s character, Gary, is special — “as lavish as that of an indulgent parent.” His affection for Gary, she continued, “is of a piece of the soft nostalgic glow he pumps into ‘Licorice Pizza.’”Cooper plays opposite Alana Haim, who also had no acting experience before “Licorice Pizza.” The pair had met briefly through Anderson several years ago, she told The Times, never thinking their paths would cross again. As soon as they read together, though, Haim recalled, “It was like, oh, we’re a team. We can take on the world together.”Cooper Hoffman, foreground, stars in “Licorice Pizza,” which was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.Melinda Sue Gordon/MGMDanceLaTasha BarnesLaTasha Barnes — a leader in the dance forms of house, hip-hop and the Lindy Hop — bridged worlds this year. Barnes is “a connector, or a rather a re-connector,” Brian Seibert wrote in the Times. In particular, she works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers (like herself) to their jazz heritage. To watch her dance, Seibert said, “is to watch historical distance collapse.”Barnes, 41, has been admired in dance for years, but it was her showing in “The Jazz Continuum” (the show she presented at Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum in May and later at Jacob’s Pillow) and her appearance in “Sw!ng Out” (the contemporary swing-dance show that debuted at the Joyce Theater in October) that caught the attention of many. In November, she won a Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer.Discouraged by dance teachers at a young age because of her body type, Barnes pivoted to gymnastics and track and field; at 18, she enlisted in the Army. She later weathered athletic injuries, as well as a broken hip, back and wrist after being hit by a car. Despite it all, her zeal for dance continued.“I was always looking at myself as the perpetual outsider,” she told The Times, “without realizing that it was actually the reverse.”The dancer LaTasha Barnes works to reconnect Black audiences and Black dancers to their jazz heritage.Cherylynn Tsushima, via The BessiesTelevisionThe Cast of Reservation Dogs“Reservation Dogs,” a dark comedy about four teenagers living on a Native reservation in Oklahoma, is a game-changer. That’s how one of its stars, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, described it, and he wouldn’t be alone. The series, from FX on Hulu, is the first on TV with an entirely Indigenous writer’s room and roster of directors. That backbone allows the undeniable synergy among its core cast members — Woon-A-Tai, Devery Jacobs, Lane Factor and Paulina Alexis — to flourish.On previous sets, Jacobs said she was “literally the only Native person for miles.” The industry “should feel embarrassed that 2021 is a year for firsts for Indigenous representation,” she went on.For Alexis, her acting dreams once felt so impossible, she felt embarrassed to tell anyone about them, she told The Times. “There was no representation on TV. I didn’t think I would make it.” Now she has a role in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” and will star in a second season of “Reservation Dogs,” which was renewed in September.The stars of “Reservation Dogs,” a groundbreaking show from FX on Hulu: from left, Paulina Alexis, Lane Factor, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Devery Jacobs.Jeremy Dennis for The New York TimesPop MusicMickey GuytonAfter Mickey Guyton was nominated for three Grammys in November, she told The New York Times, “I was right.” She was referring to her instinct for the direction of “Remember Her Name,” her debut full-length release. “This whole album came from me and what I thought I should release,” she said, “and that’s something I’ve never done.”In January, alongside major players like Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, she will have three chances to win: for best country album, best country song and best country solo performance (for the title track). Last Grammys, she became the first Black woman to be nominated for a solo country performance award for the track “Black Like Me.”Guyton, 38, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville, with song titles like “Different” and “Love My Hair.”“What’s being played on country radio has been played on country radio for the last 10 years — I can’t do that,” she told Jon Caramanica of The Times in September. “I can’t do it spiritually. I can’t write songs that don’t mean something.”The country singer Mickey Guyton, performing in New York in December, is also an outspoken activist in Nashville.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesTheaterSharlene CruzIn September, amid theater’s reopening, “Sanctuary City,” a play from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, resumed Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Like much of Majok’s work, it takes on the “plight of undocumented immigrants, with a glowering side-eye cast on the rest of us,” as Jesse Green of The Times put it in his rave of the play.Sharlene Cruz brings to life the smart, impulsive G — performing opposite Jasai Chase-Owens as B, both playing undocumented teenagers. Cruz, who is in her 20s, renders her character smartly, impulsively and with a lot of subtext. “Impulsiveness can just seem stagy — youth, a caricature,” Green told this reporter, but Cruz gets the rhythm right and is disciplined enough to put that quality in service of the character’s goals.As those goals change — G ages a few years in the play — Cruz convincingly shows how that impulsiveness hardened into hotheadedness, and youth into something that’s not quite maturity.Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens play undocumented teenagers in “Sanctuary City” at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArtPrecious OkoyomonPrecious Okoyomon, 28, a multidisciplinary artist and poet who has only been exhibiting for a few years, creates massive site-specific installations using organic materials. “I make worlds,” Okoyomon, who won the Artist Award at Frieze New York this year, told The New York Times Style Magazine. “Everything, every portal I make, is its own ecosystem.”Okoyomon, who lived in Lagos, Nigeria, as a child before moving to Texas and then Ohio, added: “I attach myself to materials such as earth, rocks, water and fire because these are things I can’t control on my own.”As part of the Frieze win, Okoyomon conceived and presented a performance-based installation at the Shed titled “This God Is A Slow Recovery,” which focused on communication or the lack thereof. “It’s about destroying our language, building it up, crashing the words into each other,” Okoyomon said. “How do we create the language to get to the new world?”This month, Okoyomon won a Chanel Next Prize, a new award from the French fashion brand established to nurture emerging talent, nominated by a group of cultural figures and selected by the jurors Tilda Swinton, David Adjaye and Cao Fei.DanceKayla FarrishIn September, the dancer and choreographer Kayla Farrish — teaming up with the jazz, soul, and experimental musician Melanie Charles — transported Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn to a vivid scene of grace and power.The performance — as part of the platform four/four presents, which commissions collaborations among artists — was “sweeping and robust work braiding music and spoken word with choreography” that encompassed the best of technical dance and athletic drills, said Gia Kourlas, the dance critic at The Times.The result turned its five dancers — Farrish, 30, was joined by Mikaila Ware, Kerime Konur, Gabrielle Loren and Anya Clarke-Verdery — into a vibrant union of musicality, tenderness and power,” Kourlas wrote. 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    ‘Licorice Pizza’ Review: California Dreaming and Scheming

    In his latest movie, Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the San Fernando Valley for a shaggy 1970s romp about a self-important teenage boy and a memorable woman.GARY“Licorice Pizza,” a shaggy, fitfully brilliant romp from Paul Thomas Anderson, takes place in a 1973 dream of bared midriffs and swinging hair, failures and pretenders. It’s set in Encino, a Los Angeles outpost in the shadow of Hollywood and the birthplace of such films as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Boogie Nights,” Anderson’s 1997 breakout about a striver’s passage into pornographic stardom. There’s DNA from both old and New Hollywood in “Licorice Pizza,” a coming-of-age romance in which no one grows up.The film’s improbable teenage hero is Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), another classic striver. A child performer who’s hit maximum adolescent awkwardness, Gary is 15 and aging out of his professional niche. He still performs, but has started to diversify. Yet even as he embraces uncertain new ventures, his faith in himself remains steady, keeping his smile lit and smooth talk oozing. Deranged optimism and self-importance are American birthrights, and if his confidence weren’t so poignantly outsized — and if Anderson were in a tougher mood — Gary would be a figure of tragedy rather than of comedy.Anderson always maintains a level of detachment toward his characters, letting you see their unembellished flaws, both insignificant and defining. He loves them with the prerogative of any director. But his love for Gary is special, as lavish as that of an indulgent parent, and his affection for the character is of a piece of the soft nostalgic glow he pumps into “Licorice Pizza,” blunting its edges and limiting the film’s overall effect. The gap between what you see in Gary and what he sees in himself makes the character hard to get a handle on, and more interesting. Gary blunders and bluffs, finding success and defeat, fueled by a braggadocio that, much like one of the earthquake faults running under the city, threatens to bring the whole thing tumbling down at any moment.This instability suits the freewheeling, episodic structure, even if Gary wears out his welcome. The film opens on a school picture day with high-school boys preening in a bathroom and lines of students snaking outside. An amusingly portentous cherry bomb explodes in a toilet and before long Gary is ogling Alana (Alana Haim, the rock musician), an assistant for a creep who’s taking the kids’ pictures. The photographer slaps her ass. Gary is more of a romantic. He’s knocked out by Alana, instantly smitten, a thunderbolt moment that Anderson memorializes with a prodigious tracking shot that gets both the camera and the story’s juices going. Gary has met the girl he’s going to marry even if she doesn’t know it.Anderson keeps the camera and characters beautifully flowing through minor and major adventures of varying interest. Most of these are inaugurated by Gary’s entrepreneurial hustling, which takes him all over the nabe and sometimes beyond. He dips into bars and restaurants, shops and audition rooms, and belts out a tune in a show where he upstages a cruelly funny stand-in for Lucille Ball (Christine Ebersole), who threatens to castrate him (not really, but the rage is real). He jousts with his enemy (Skyler Gisondo), a wee smoothie who slides in like Dean Martin in his cups, which is as sleazy and silly as it sounds. Gary also gets busted, starts a few businesses, runs from the law and into Alana’s arms, which remain as dependably open as a late-night diner.ALANA“Licorice Pizza” has its seductions, most notably Alana. She’s a fabulous creation, at once down-to-earth real as a friend who grew up in the Valley and as fantastical as a Hollywood dream girl. When Alana first walks through Gary’s school, Anderson makes sure to show her in long shot, head to toe, exasperated and slumped, hair and miniskirt gently in sync. This is Haim’s first movie but she has a seasoned performer’s presence and physical assurance. Her expressive range — her face drains and fills as effortlessly as if she were handling a water tap — and humanizing lack of vanity are crucial, partly because she’s a delight to watch and because Hoffman is a frustratingly limited foil.For reasons that only she knows, Alana agrees to go out with Gary, initiating a relationship that makes no sense but one that Anderson certainly enjoys. She’s about 10 years older than Gary, maybe more. He’s big for his age and taller than her, and with his swagger and belly bulging over his belt, you can already see the used car salesman he might one day become. But right now he’s a kid. “Do you think it’s weird,” Alana asks a friend, while smoking a joint, “that I hang out with Gary and his friends all the time?” Alana says she think it’s weird (it is), but what she believes doesn’t have much bearing on the story and she continually bends to suit Gary’s needs as well as Anderson’s, which don’t include psychological realism.Anderson asks a lot of Haim: He makes sure we see her nipples at full mast under her shirt and parades her around in a bikini when everyone else is dressed. These moments are in line with some of the more flagrantly obnoxious stereotypes that he folds in, just like a studio hack might have done back in the day while having a witless chuckle. There’s a sycophantic assistant who’s a mincing cliché, and the white owner of a Japanese restaurant who speaks in broken English. Anderson deploys these stereotypes without editorializing, which is a commentary on their use, and just enough timing and attention to make it clear that he’s enjoying tweaking contemporary sensibilities.These moments are cheap and stupid and add nothing to a movie that throws out a great deal to alternating scattershot and lasered effect: the OPEC oil crisis, water beds, the silhouette of palm trees against a night sky and the kind of stars who no longer shine bright. One of the recurrent beats that Anderson hits best in “Licorice Pizza” is what it’s like to live in a company town like Los Angeles, where everyone is in the business, seems to be, or wants to be, and so keeps hanging on to Hollywood and its promise, whether it’s Gary or the faded and midlevel stars idling in the neighborhood joint. There, Sean Penn roars in as a old-studio lush as Tom Waits and other pals grin on the sidelines.Throughout, Alana keeps fuming and blazing, steadily lighting up Gary and the film as brightly as Fourth of July fireworks, even as the story slides here and there, and gathers and loses momentum. The movie doesn’t always know what to do with Alana other than dog after her, and it’s a particular bummer that while Anderson makes her an object of love and lust, he shortchanges her sexual desire. Alana may be lost, but she isn’t dead, quite the reverse. She’s a woman who’s alive to the world and aware of her own attraction. But she’s a blank libidinally, as virginal and safe as a teen-comedy heroine. She doesn’t even ask Gary to pleasure her, not that he would know what to do.Alana deserves better, dammit! Everyone knows it (OK, not Gary) even the Hollywood producer based on the real Jon Peters (a sensational Bradley Cooper) knows it. Resplendently fuzzed, a white shirt framing his chest hair, a kilo of coke (probably) up his nose, Peters appears after Gary starts a water bed company. The business is a long, not especially good story, but Peters, who’s dating Barbra Streisand, wants a bed and he wants it now. This initiates a tour de force sequence in which Alana, who’s helping Gary run things, natch, takes the wheel of a monstrous moving truck. She’s a natural, a genius, Streisand, Andretti, a California goddess, and, as she brakes and slows and goes, Alana gives you a vision of perfection and “Licorice Pizza” the driver it needs.Licorice PizzaRated R for stereotypes, language and teen high jinks. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Paul Thomas Anderson on “Licorice Pizza” and Age Difference

    The auteur explains why he cast Alana Haim, and why he thinks the age difference in the film’s central relationship shouldn’t matter.Maybe Paul Thomas Anderson brought the fog with him. The 51-year-old director had just returned from a trip to London, where his last film, “Phantom Thread,” was set, and now the sky above his native San Fernando Valley was choked by dark, portentous clouds.“I like it like this,” Anderson said as we sat outside a vegan Mexican restaurant in the Studio City neighborhood. “You never get the fog cover here. Take it while you can!”Anderson is the auteur who made the sky rain frogs in “Magnolia”; in front of his camera, even Southern California’s normally placid weather has the potential for grandeur. The movies he has set here, including “Boogie Nights,” have an engaging sprawl not unlike the Valley itself, and Anderson has returned to his home turf for his ninth feature, “Licorice Pizza,” opening Friday.The 1970s-set movie stars Cooper Hoffman, son of Anderson’s onetime muse, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as a smooth-talking high schooler named Gary, who flirts shamelessly with Alana (Alana Haim), a 20-something girl helping to take class pictures. She rebuffs his advances, but there’s still something about this guileless hustler that intrigues her, and they become friends, business partners and eventually something more.Hoffman is sweet and appealing, but the revelation of “Licorice Pizza” is Haim, a marvelously spiky screen presence. Though she had never led a movie before, Anderson has directed several music videos she appeared in with her sisters Danielle and Este, who together form the rock band Haim. “It’s funny, because she’s not the best musician in the band, but she’s the best actress,” Anderson said.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did you get into the orbit of Haim and meet Alana Haim in the first place?That story is wild. I first heard their music on the radio in about 2012, the song “Forever.” Then I heard it again and again and I started to think, “This song is following me around.” I read a little bit about them, realized they were from Studio City. We invited them to our house for dinner, and then they revealed to me that their mother was a woman named Donna Rose, who was my elementary-school art teacher.You had no idea?None. I’m the father of three girls, and you can imagine and hope that your daughters would turn out to be this miraculous. But there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on, some unexplainable feeling that I had, so when they told me that their mother had been my teacher, everything made sense. Like, why did I have this weird obsession with these three girls playing music?And their mother was a huge influence on me. I went to a school with, like, white-haired ladies who were rough, and there was one lady with long, beautiful, flowing brown hair — who looked exactly like Alana, by the way. I was in love with her as a young boy, absolutely smitten. She would sing songs during class, and she was the exact opposite of every other teacher. So that cemented the relationship in a pretty serious way. Our collaboration was more than just directing their music videos — our families became intertwined.And when did you zero in on Alana as the lead in “Licorice Pizza”?The music videos generally focus on [her older sister] Danielle, because she’s the lead singer. But when I thought about this story that I had, it fit Alana.Why?I’ve seen Alana’s ferociousness. She may look like a Jewish girl from the Valley, but she’s sort of a ’30s throwback, fast-talking, very funny, very sharp. You do not want to challenge her in a fight with words, because she will win.Did the studio want you to cast an established actress instead of Alana?It was no battle. MGM trusted my track record, I suppose. By the way, I wouldn’t want to think about having to convince another actress to not wear makeup and drop that level of vanity that seems to surround a lot of young actresses. It takes somebody with some guts to say, “It’s impossible to justify wearing makeup in the San Fernando Valley in 1973, therefore I won’t do it.” It sounds like not that big a deal, but it’s a big deal for a lot of people.Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in a scene from “Licorice Pizza.”MGMYou wrote the film with Alana in mind. Did you also think of Cooper while writing it?No. Halfway through, he popped into my mind, but I quickly put the lid back on that thought.Why?I’ve been asking myself why. It’s probably because I was protective, thinking, “Hang on a second, there’s a traditional way to do this, and there are many young actors out there.” But I wasn’t finding anybody that seemed to have the same soulfulness I knew he had. Everybody seemed precocious, perhaps too trained at too young an age.It was odd, the way everything started to line up. This was a very homegrown film where I’m casting from a pool of my life, not just a collection of actors that I’ve auditioned. How am I going to enter into this with the lead actor being somebody that I don’t know personally and intimately? But as a matter of fact, I didn’t really tell him what I was thinking. I said, “Just look at this script, and maybe you can help me read it out loud so I can hear something.”You’re secretly auditioning the people in your life all the time, aren’t you?Exactly. Of course, it didn’t work at all. He saw right through it.When you’re casting somebody like Cooper Hoffman, who has never led a movie before, what are you thinking about how the fame from this will change his life?You think about locking the door and throwing away the key and protecting them. Or, more realistically, holding their hand and guiding them through a creative endeavor, and showing them that the reason you do it is for the collaboration and the experience. But it’s a good question. Another way to phrase the question is, “Have you ever thought about why you’re trying to ruin this person’s life?” [Laughs.]Does it surprise you how some people are reacting to the age difference between Alana and Gary?There’s no line that’s crossed, and there’s nothing but the right intentions. It would surprise me if there was some kind of kerfuffle about it, because there’s not that much there. That’s not the story that we made, in any kind of way. There isn’t a provocative bone in this film’s body.There’s at least one provocative bone in this film’s body. I’m thinking of the scenes with a white restaurateur, played by John Michael Higgins, where he talks to his Japanese wife in an accent so offensive that my audience actually gasped.Well, that’s different. I think it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021. You can’t have a crystal ball, you have to be honest to that time. Not that it wouldn’t happen right now, by the way. My mother-in-law’s Japanese and my father-in-law is white, so seeing people speak English to her with a Japanese accent is something that happens all the time. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More