Alana Haim

Picture day at a school in Encino, 1973. Alana Kane is twenty-five, working for the school photographer, living at home, and a fifteen-year-old with a salesman's patter asks her to dinner. She says no. Then she turns up. Alana Haim had never acted before Licorice Pizza (2021), and what she does in it is something trained actors are mostly taught out of: she plays a woman who does not know what she wants, and is cross about it. Alana scowls, strides, snaps at children and is rude to nearly everyone, and she is the centre of the film because she is the only person in it without a plan.

The route in was unusual. Haim is a musician first, one third of HAIM with her sisters Este and Danielle since the late 2000s, and Paul Thomas Anderson had been directing the band's videos from around 2013 before he wrote a lead for her. Since then she has kept the band going and taken parts sparingly: Terri Mooney in Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind (2025), Mae West in Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025), and Rachel in Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama (2026). We have not reviewed the two 2025 films, so we will not judge them here.

What Anderson found is worth naming. Early in Licorice Pizza, Gary rings her after their date and neither of them speaks; they sit in separate rooms with the receivers to their ears and breathe. It moved us far more than two people saying nothing down a telephone has any right to, and we think the reason is that Haim does not soften it. She is not shy on the line, she is stubborn, and the scene is about two people who will not be the one to hang up. Anderson knows how to shoot her standing still, and the film lets her be tiresome without asking us to forgive her for it.

The Drama uses her differently, and less well. Rachel is pitched to grate, and does; she says out loud what the rest of the table is thinking, and Borgli brings her in whenever the temperature drops. It is a use, not a part. The film's one alarming scene belongs to its two leads, and Haim is the person who keeps the table uncomfortable in between. She is good at it. The worry is that it is the easiest thing she does, and that a run of supporting roles could settle into the abrasive friend who is fetched in for a laugh.

She has said, "I love playing characters that are so outrageous, and I've been lucky enough to work with directors that really let me run free." Outrageous is the thing she can do in ten minutes. What she did over two hours in Licorice Pizza was quieter and harder, and it was not outrageous at all. Watch that first, and then see whether the next director is willing to wait for her.