At a crucial moment in “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s electrifying new action thriller, someone cries out, “Who are you?!” A fair question. The man being asked is Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, in a past life, was known as Pat, Ghetto Pat, and Rocket Man. The movie opens in that past life, with Pat a member of the French 75, a ragtag band of militants who free imprisoned migrants and bomb the offices of pro-life politicians. Their objective is for America to one day be “free from fear,” to quote Pat’s partner, who has only one name, Perfidia Beverly Hills, but it’s enough. She’s played by Teyana Taylor, who lit up the independent drama “A Thousand and One” (2023) as an ex-con determinedly raising a son. Here, with a flinty gaze and revolutionary fervor, Taylor casts maternal instinct to the winds. In a startling image, a pregnant Perfidia fires off rounds with a machine-gun butt pressed against her swollen belly. You worry about the poor kid’s ears as you jam fingers into your own.
The film’s opening half hour is loud, tense, and extraordinarily propulsive: we follow the French 75 through raids, robberies, blown-up buildings, and smashed-up cars. Compounding the cacophony is a Jonny Greenwood score that veers between manic percolation—imagine a xylophone humping a coffeepot—and grandly operatic surges of synth. The music sweeps us up in the queasy thrill of revolt, but also in the heat and momentum of an impetuous romance. Perfidia and Pat are like an Antifa-pilled Bonnie and Clyde, minus the impotence.
There is, alas, a snake in their Eden. One night, as Perfidia’s team swarms an immigrant detention center, she accosts and arouses a U.S. Army officer (Sean Penn) whose name, Steven J. Lockjaw, is as comically blunt as hers. A sexual cat-and-mouse game ensues, complete with kinky phallic gunplay. It’s a strange match, to say the least. Perfidia is the most determined of agitators, and Lockjaw is a scowling racist; in Penn’s tightly wound performance, we see lust spiked with self-loathing. But Anderson knows that, amid clashing political extremes, racial and ideological purists can make surprising, and treacherous, bedfellows. Shortly after Perfidia gives birth to a daughter, Charlene, everything goes horribly wrong: many members of the French 75 are captured or killed, and Pat and newborn Charlene go into hiding. Perfidia vanishes for good, and you miss her terribly; Taylor is so vivid that even her absence becomes a presence.
Sixteen years pass. Hunkered down in the Southwestern city of Baktan Cross, Bob (as Pat is now called) learns that his fugitive past is about to catch up with him and Charlene (who now goes by Willa). He asks his old rebel comrades for help, prompting the film to spring another important question: “What time is it?” The question, delivered via pay phone, is an old security prompt, and Bob, with a memory fried by pot and booze, cannot remember the answer. (No two-factor authentication here.) He responds with an instant-classic rant, a string of escalating, expletive-laced threats. But the question reverberates for a man who’s spent years wasting away, always watching his back, never looking forward. What time is it? In more than one sense, Bob hasn’t a clue.
It was shrewd, if counterintuitive, to cast DiCaprio as a man aging into oblivion. In the opening stretch, as young Pat fights the power, we’re touched by the actor’s boyishness, still clinging to him at fifty. Almost two decades later, that youthful air has gone endearingly to seed. Anderson, a big-hearted farceur, brings out the humor in Bob’s devolution without treating him like a punch line; DiCaprio, sporting a plaid robe and a dishevelled man bun, hasn’t been this shamblingly funny since “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). He gives this bedraggled stoner a screwball nobility, plus a heart of girl-dad gold. Bob may be a fuckup, but he’s done right by Willa.
A smart, plucky teen-ager with a purple belt in martial arts, Willa is played by the remarkable Chase Infiniti, and not even Anderson would have dared make that name up. The moniker, though befitting a sports car, almost perfectly describes the high-stakes pursuit that consumes the remaining two hours. Lockjaw, who has only tightened over the years, has discovered Bob and Willa’s whereabouts, and has sent in troops to apprehend them. His pretext is a crackdown on migrants—a reminder, if we needed one, that there is no easier scapegoat when it comes to the seizure and abuse of power.
The sixties haunt “One Battle After Another,” in ways obvious and not. The French 75 is clearly modelled on that decade’s countercultural rebels; at one point, Bob throws on “The Battle of Algiers” (1966), watching through a haze of nostalgia. Anderson’s primary source is Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, “Vineland,” about a former hippie, Zoyd Wheeler, nursing a hell of a Reaganite hangover. The novel is set in 1984, but the plot keeps sliding backward into the sixties, in woozy reveries that engulf Zoyd like quicksand. Anderson handles the text far more loosely than he did Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice,” which he adapted for the screen in 2014. In replanting “Vineland” in the acrid soil of the present day, Anderson wisely dispenses with flashbacks entirely. The characters barrel forward from first frame to last, wired into the urgency of the now.
The film was shot, by Michael Bauman, on VistaVision, a 35-mm. format whose Hollywood glories include “The Searchers” (1956) and “Vertigo” (1958). Bauman’s images, however, have a raw, anticlassical, guerrilla-documentary immediacy: migrant families crowded into pens, a protester throwing a Molotov cocktail at riot police. The camera goes hurtling after the characters, none of whom move the same way. Note the stiffness of Lockjaw’s gait as he marches, hopeful yet anxious, through the upper corridors of Christofascist power. See Bob race to keep up with a group of shadowy young skateboarders during a rooftop escape—a resonant portrait of generational slippage. (The punch line is a tumble worthy of Wile E. Coyote.) Best of all, watch Willa’s suavely resourceful martial-arts instructor (Benicio del Toro) as he steers Bob through the bowels of his “Latino Harriet Tubman situation,” an elaborate safe house for immigrants. More stories surely lurk within these labyrinthine hallways, and there could be no wittier, more charismatic guide than del Toro, who strolls and even dances through the movie with Zen grace.
