In some circles, a new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson is hailed in much the same way citizens of a small, quaint village celebrating a religious feast day might greet a saint’s statue, bedecked with flowers, as it wheels through on a little cart. Because Anderson is known, and revered, for making Important Movies with Serious Themes (There Will Be Blood, The Master), those who consider themselves serious film people greet each new arrival as an Important Event. Though it’s nice to be respected, that isn’t a comfortable space for a filmmaker to live in, especially in an era when movies are being taken less and less seriously. Now that so many people watch movies at home, they’re becoming indistinguishable from television to many consumers; it’s all stuff that pours through the portal of the small screen. In this climate, a filmmaker who cares—and Anderson definitely cares—is at a disadvantage. Should he try to top his grandest work, or should he give an audience the gift of a weird-ass black comedy, one that never signals to the viewer what’s going to happen next?
With One Battle After Another, Anderson gives us the latter, and it’s the right choice. Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, a revolutionary whose specialty is explosives. In an early scene, he and his gang—we’ll later learn that they go by the name French 75, just like the fancy drink—descend upon an immigrant-detention facility, hustling these prisoners of the U.S. government into a giant truck to get them the hell out of there. Bob’s girlfriend is the fierce Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the member most loyal to the group’s principles, whatever those are: like all revolutionaries, the French 75 believe what they believe, fiercely, to the extent that their singlemindedness sometimes obscures the cause at hand. But they’re definitely on the side of “the people,” and in that early raid, Perfidia—speedy, muscular, alluring, with a tough little no-nonsense face—fearlessly grabs the gun and the cap of the crusty officer in charge, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). As she waves his own gun at him, ordering him around like a bossy dominatrix, his eyes practically pop out of his head. They’re not the only thing that pops.
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Eventually, Perfidia and Bob will have a child: Bob adores his little daughter, while the ever-restless Perfidia—who, we learn, comes from a long line of revolutionaries—can’t wait to get on to the next radical happening. “She’s a runner, and you’re a stone,” Perfidia’s mother tells Bob as he cradles and coos to his daughter, whom the couple have named Charlene.
Then a bank job goes wrong. Perfidia and Bob are separated, and Baby Charlene is left in her father’s care. Next thing we know, she’s a teenager going by the name of Willa (played by Chase Infiniti), living under the protective watch of her father who, while remaining a revolutionary at heart (sort of), has shaped a new life for them both. He strives to protect Willa from his and Perfidia’s past.
In terms of plot details, you probably shouldn’t know much more than that going into One Battle After Another, which Anderson wrote using Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland as inspiration. One Battle takes place in an alarmingly divided America—actually, Anderson’s vision looks something like the America of a few years back, when we were less divided than we are now, though that doesn’t make it a happier place. This is a comedy with grim underpinnings, set in a society where violence seems to be the only answer. Anderson doesn’t find that exhilarating—if anything, he’s despairing about it—yet he soldiers on, pinpointing some truths so somber and dismal that it hurts to laugh about them.
Pynchon’s cerebral braininess sets something free in Anderson; that was also true of the messy, brilliant adaptation of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice he made in 2014. One Battle is really an Anderson-Pynchon mashup, a work that filters Pynchonesque ideas and moods through Anderson’s prismatic vision. It’s squirrely in an exhilarating way: where else are you going to find a group of rebel nuns known as the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, or see Benicio del Toro as a cooler-than-ice-cream martial arts instructor named Sensei Sergio St. Carlos? One Battle shoots off in a gazillion directions at once, to the extent that you can’t imagine how it’s all going to wrap up. Anderson keeps all the parts moving deftly, with the help of cinematographer Michael Bauman and editor Andy Jurgensen. The film features a gorgeously orchestrated car-chase scene that’s almost languid: rolling ribbons of highway provide all the drama, no fast cutting necessary.
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One Battle After Another is also bitterly funny, even as its perceptiveness can leave you feeling queasy. One paint-dab of the movie’s swirl-art plot involves a secret white supremacist group known as the Christmas Adventurers’ Club—their greeting is a hearty “Hail, St. Nick!” and Tony Goldwyn plays one of their morally upright grand pooh-bahs. The group’s ridiculous sense of self-importance is hilarious only until you remember that in 2025, the idea of a secret society of white supremacists is actually quaint; now these people just work their black magic out in the open. One Battle isn’t so much dystopian as it is nostalgic for a more innocent time, when bigots felt compelled to keep their true feelings under wraps even as they edged ever closer to their big power grab.
In that sense, One Battle After Another is of the moment without hammering away at us with its ideas; its seriousness is the unserious kind, which makes it even more potent, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. At certain points, Anderson makes revolutionaries seem cool. One of them is played, with true-believer zeal, by Regina Hall. Alana Haim, so quietly extraordinary in Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, plays another: dressed in ordinary work clothes, she’s so everyday-average that you marvel at the level of damage she could wreak in the name of her cause.
But Anderson also knows that the moral purity of revolutionaries gets boring pretty fast. (We get the picture when a character known as Comrade Josh chides one of his underground colleagues for failing to remember an important code word: “Maybe you should have studied the rebellion text a little harder.”) It’s all well and good to fight for a cause, but One Battle is also about something simpler, and more universal: DiCaprio’s Bob is just a single dad trying to hold everything together, and to keep his daughter safe. Willa has never known her mother—later, she’ll learn the truth and an untruth about the woman who gave birth to her—but she loves her father fiercely. Infiniti makes that mix of tenderness and eye-rolling protectiveness believable. But it’s DiCaprio’s Bob, dressed in a layabout’s grandpa plaid bathrobe, who carries the movie. In the old days, Bob could be set on fire by the latest cause. Now that flame is just a flicker; he spends most of his days smoking weed. (One of the white-supremacist squares refers to him, hilariously, as a “reefer addict.”)
But there’s still some fight in Bob; it’s merely taken a different form. DiCaprio makes a great, vital has-been, squinting at the horrors around him in disbelief, but mostly, driven by the need to protect his child. The movie ends with a fairytale moment of comfort that feels false, the kind of glossed-over semi-truth you might tell your kids so they can sleep at night. In a world of ugly realities, Anderson seems to know we need this. There’s no way to fight for the future without getting a good night’s sleep first. If One Battle After Another didn’t close with a lullaby, it would have to end with a whimper, and we’re not ready for that just yet.
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