Paul Thomas Anderson’s Intimate Revolution

You couldn’t make a movie like “One Battle After Another” in 2025. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon-inspired action drama is said to have cost Warner Bros. as much as $175 million, or roughly the price of a Marvel movie. Given these numbers and its audacious, urgent radicalism, it’s hard to imagine the film being green-lit anywhere in Burbank nine months into Trump II, an era of kowtowing studios like Disney and Paramount and merger-hungry executives like Warner’s David Zaslav. 

But thankfully, “One Battle After Another” was approved two years ago, and it arrives as a sorely needed outlier in a mainstream cinematic culture where politics is smuggled — if it’s present at all — inside stories about wizards, aliens and young adult dystopias. The latest from the 55-year-old Anderson does not wink or allegorize, and is less “The Hunger Games” than “The Battle of Algiers.” Indeed, an early scene finds Leonardo DiCaprio’s stoner protagonist quoting along to a viewing of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic of anti-colonialism, as though this were the ridiculous manner in which Anderson had conceived of the idea.

Pynchon’s “Vineland,” which inspires “One Battle After Another,” was long considered unadaptable by Anderson, but his film borrows the skeleton of the novel, updating its Reagan-era nostalgia for ’60s hippie politics with the long shadow of George W. Bush’s war on terror. The result is a zany, riveting and radioactive family saga featuring a burned out former radical, Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), loosely based on the novel’s Zoyd Wheeler. He’s a tosspot father who ends up on the run with his headstrong teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), when the terrifying Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) returns from the past to hunt them. As in Pynchon’s story, Willa’s parentage is ambiguous, given the villainous Lockjaw’s past relationship with the teen’s estranged turncoat mother, the Black revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). 

The 162-minute runtime feels like a breeze, beginning with a 40-minute prologue in which Ferguson fights alongside a guerilla outfit called the French 75 (named for the breakthrough cannon). Its members, led by Perfidia, liberate detained migrants from chain-link fenced facilities, rob banks to build their arsenal and bomb unjust courthouses upholding abortion bans in the film’s exciting opening scenes. Their movement is torpedoed when Lockjaw turns Perfidia against her comrades, sending Ferguson and their newborn into hiding with new identities amongst a tight-knit Latino community in the town of Baktan Cross.

The main story takes place 16 years after these events, with the now-exhausted, pot-smoking Ferguson struggling to relate to his headstrong martial-artist high school daughter, who resents him for his paranoia. She isn’t allowed an iPhone and must carry one of the French 75’s outdated Motorola transmitters with her at all times, just in case. DiCaprio loses his cool over buzzwords like “triggers” and “safe spaces,” and his eye-rolling, old-man-yells-at-cloud anxieties about evolving language and tech echo countless works by millennial and Gen X filmmakers, most recently in Ari Aster’s “Eddington.” However, Anderson quickly subverts these grievances, as the movie begins to suggest that older and younger generations (including Willa’s) are all really fighting the same fight. The French 75’s losses become a remorseful stand-in for the more recent failures of liberalism to stop the rise of MAGA. The time for revolution, the film suggests, isn’t just now, but was two decades ago. The battle rages on. 

After Lockjaw is approached by a secretive ethnonationalist syndicate named the Christmas Adventurers, he settles on a plan to eliminate Willa — the living proof of his miscegenation — under the guise of rounding up Baktan’s Latino migrants. This politicized pursuit scatters Willa and Ferguson in different directions while roping in colorful side characters such as a ruthless Native American bounty hunter and ganja-growing nuns. Throughout, Lockjaw is a magnificently scary embodiment of everyday white supremacy, whose hypocrisies and complexities remain secondary to his advocacy for ethnic cleansing. Penn imbues the character with uncomfortable tics in moments of anger and frustration, his primal racial animus always on the verge of breaking through his civilized façade. 

After Willa is extracted by one of Ferguson’s old comrades — Regina Hall in a small but impactful role — the camera frequently spins around a disoriented, drug-addled DiCaprio in fluid long takes, mining extended hilarity from Ferguson having forgotten his training. The former rebel pratfalls his way through chaotic scenarios to find his daughter with the help of her brusque karate instructor Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), who quietly runs an immigrant underground railroad. Without slowing down, and aided by a mischievous and effervescent soundtrack by Johnny Greenwood, “One Battle After Another” explores the fragile resilience of community and solidarity in the face of authoritarian crackdowns. The story, meanwhile, escalates in unexpected ways. The side-splitting comedy of Ferguson escaping across rooftops while trying to keep pace with young skaters becomes a chance to raise the stakes: The scene’s fiery backdrop is populated by enormous crowds of protesters fighting jackbooted military thugs. 

The firm handshake between story and aesthetics makes “One Battle After Another” unique in the world of modern Hollywood action movies. Its flourishes are thoughtful — pronounced lens flares embody the danger of border patrol tanks just out of frame — and action becomes an extension of character and theme. It culminates in an inventive, white-knuckle car chase on a mountainous highway, capturing the sensation of riding literal and sociopolitical tides. 

But it’s in the film’s treatment of race where Anderson outdoes “Vineland,” a comparatively unconfrontational book. From the get-go, Anderson centers fearsome Black women whose vibrant energy consumes the screen, and the heart of his story is a white father trying desperately to connect with his Black daughter as a powerful, Klan-like organization gives chase. The racism on display in “One Battle After Another” is terrifyingly casual, which Anderson may know from experience as a white man married to a Black biracial woman, and the father of biracial children. The film’s momentous sweeps are grounded in poignant emotional beats, like Ferguson confessing that he never learned to braid Black hair when Willa was younger. But despite wearing his heart on his sleeve, Anderson does not paint in overly broad strokes, and avoids tipping over into the didactic. His dialogue is punchy, never preachy. The characters’ radical actions speak for themselves. 

Representing a collision of intimacy and bombast, Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is the rare American studio film that captures the revolutionary spirit, balancing energizing tableaus of rebellion with sobering realities about who and what is at stake. It’s a hilarious, invigorating and, at moments, breathtaking work that feels dangerous to the touch.