So the basic shape of the movie is that an older guy (played by Philip Baker Hall, who will go on to become a Paul Thomas Anderson regular, with his role in Magnolia probably being his peak) picks up a young John C. Reilly (who again will go on to be in more of PTA’s stuff before becoming a mostly comedic actor), who is sitting outside of a diner, dead broke after a bad trip to Vegas.

What follows is the older guy becoming a sort of mentor and father figure to Reilly, taking him to casinos and showing him how to make the system work for him (though this is a weak point of the movie: We don’t see too much concrete stuff about how to make the life of a gambler pay off, because of course, you really mostly can’t). Later, he collects another stray, a waitress/prostitute played by Gwyneth Paltrow, for equally unclear reasons.

If there’s a central mystery of this movie, it’s why the old guy is doing all this and what his deal is. We do find out later, and it sort of recasts his character (and drives some actions from him that seem both like and unlike what we’d expect from him). It’s ultimately a movie about how we live with our pasts, and how that past shapes who we are in inextricable ways.

This is Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie. As first movies go, it’s relatively solid. It doesn’t have much of that shakiness and stiffness that you associate with first movies, with just a few scenes that don’t quite play right, and which I suspect he would do differently today.

The acting is great: In addition to the talented leads, it also has a young Sam Jackson in a smaller role, and an impossibly young Philip Seymour Hoffman stealing a scene in a very small role (no surprise that he’d go on to be another of PTA’s regulars). It’s well shot, with a lot of that neon-and-darkness grimy glory retro-Vegas aesthetic that you’d expect from the setting and subject matter.

But that’s also where it comes up a little short. This has some of PTA’s directorial voice in it — if you didn’t know who directed it, he’d definitely be one of your top three guesses — but mostly it feels like a well-made ’90s indie movie. It’s got a kind of loose ‘70s aesthetic to parts of it, it’s heavily mannered and stylized, its characters are frequently dangerous people living on the margins of society, and at key parts it breaks into surprising and sometimes farcical violence.

There were an absolute shit-ton of Tarantino knockoffs after Pulp Fiction, and this movie slots right into that subgenre. If this was all you knew of PTA, you might find it plausible that he’d basically spawn a Guy Ritchie-like oeuvre of enjoyable-enough Tarantino pastiche. But of course, we know where he ends up for real, and you can also see how this fits into his actually-existing body of work — but it’s ultimately as a minor work, a promising debut that doesn’t yet fully realize his talent.