It’s 1972, when the air is the color of orange and the Mexican parrots in their cages over the bar at La Strega are bathed in the sunset’s tie dyed glow, and the air is rich with the scent of patchouli. Oh man, “it’s the stuff dreams are made of.”

But we can’t relive it. Still, the next best thing is right at our finger tips. Waterville’s Railroad Square Cinema is the best place in the world right now to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice,” a candy-colored, Technicolored dream smoke/film noir thriller, drawn from a Thomas Pynchon novel and dressed all up in Skittle-colored scenes structured ever so cleverly by Paul Thomas Anderson.

It’s never comforting to sit in the dark with an Anderson film: “There Will Be Blood,” “Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights.” Anderson doesn’t make “popcorn” movies. There are no sand dunes and camels, no terrorists nor bombs. There are only people, often broken people looking for the human glue of love to mend themselves with.

The Square is ideal, because it’s set right next to Buon Appetito, a fabulous little Mexican restaurant with a brand new bar, where you can prep yourself with a couple of straight shots of tequila to ease the pain of your cold aching bones, and prepare yourself to come into the world of Pynchon, and walk in the fog with the ghosts of Hammett, J.M. Cain and Jim Thompson.

We are in Los Angeles just as the ’60s are colliding with the ’70s, and only if you lived those years can you know that Anderson has gotten it right: orange-colored sunsets burning into azure blue where Santa Monica meets the ocean. We meet Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix in his best ever role), the bastard noir grandson of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Doc is a licensed private investigator and a psychic doppelganger of “The Dude” Lebowski.

Doc barely lives in the present. Doc is the only stoner P.I. in modern literature. Doc tells his detractors that he is officially licensed, professional and straight, and he totally believes it. His office is a room in the back of a gynecologist’s office in a strip mall, where the receptionist (Maya Rudolph) takes his messages.

Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even the past.” Far out, man, too much. And so, out of the smoggy shadows a lovely vision, a fine as wine — ex flower child Shasta Fay Hepworth, played properly in no more than three notes by Katherine Waterston, a Roman Polanski night dream with a voice like warm July rain and body that would have driven Renoir mad.

Shasta needs help, and she’s willing to drag Doc out of his comfortable patchouli cloud dream to a new scary place where money floats like buckets of Necco wafers on Champagne-filled swimming pools, where the women are expensive toys and men play games like pit bulls.

You will meet: Ensenada Slim, “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, Sloane Wolfmann, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, Sauncho Smilax and Coy Harlingen as a fugitive jazz saxophonist, who may know things living people shouldn’t know.

Women? We get Jade, an unwrapped Chinese fortune cookie with a message only insiders can read. These are stunners with film noir names like Sloane, Petunia Leeway and Xandra. There are no Bettys or Marys here. And OMG, is that Reese Witherspoon as a leggy, world-weary district attorney? Yes it is, and she and Doc still bear heat wounds from long ago nights on the beach. She confers with him on a park bench, looking like a case worker tending to a homeless junkie, but there is something there still too tender to touch.

The back up cast is resplendent: Bencio Del Toro as Doc’s lawyer, Eric Roberts as Michael Z. Wolfmann, and Josh Brolin unleashed as Lt. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, who kicks down doors, and orders lunch in broken Japanese. Sam Spade would have iced him, but Doc dances away.

If you’re over 60, you’ll hear echoes of Bogie in San Francisco or Dick Powell, swigging bourbon in his pork pie hat while looking for “Velma” in “Murder, My Sweet.”

But this is Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” “The Crying of Lot 49” and Paul Thomas Anderson at the switch. This is no nostalgic pastiche. We’d like that, but it’s not. It’s new and genuine and fresh. It’s “The Black Bird” for a new generation, and Joaquin’s best and funniest role ever. Phoenix has been to the dark side and he knows how to paint it. His eyes in every scene are full of the comic confusion and childhood love of crayon colors. Even with a killer headache and hangover, he welcomes each day like a new toy, ever grateful to still be alive. Like a getaway car,

“Inherent Vice” slows down occasionally so we catch our breath, but it picks up steam and rolls again. “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.”

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.

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