(there will be spoilers)

I was pretty sure I’d like Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, but I was surprised to walk out feeling it was the movie of the year. That’s not only because it speaks so deeply to our exact moment of political insanity, but because it’s such an exhilarating viewing experience – confident, masterful filmmaking, very effective as a thriller, but also extremely funny, absurd and original. It’s possibly Anderson’s most traditionally entertaining movie but it doesn’t feel in any way watered down or compromised.

I saw it in bona fide IMAX, where its Vista Vision format fills the entire screen, so the anxiety-inducing score by Johnny Greenwood rumbles in your jaw as you stare at a scraggly, sweaty, 37-foot-tall Leonardo DiCaprio face fretting and scowling. Then sometimes it switches to a taller version of a Sergio-Leone-type-shot where two tiny characters stand apart on opposite sides of the screen. That’s the full range of cinema right there.

The credits say this was inspired by (not adapted from) the book Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I was surprised when I learned that character names like Perfidia Beverly Hills, Virgil Throckmorton and Junglepussy didn’t come from the book. These little heightened details spike a mostly naturalistic feeling world with exaggeration and draw attention to the authentic ridiculousness of our world. Sometimes that feels more real than if it was realistic.

DiCaprio (THE QUICK AND THE DEAD) plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, the explosives expert and dumb boyfriend of Perfidia (Teyana Taylor, STOMP THE YARD: HOMECOMING), a particularly flamboyant revolutionary in an underground resistance group called the French 75. In the heart-pounding opening sequence they execute a raid on an immigrant detention camp, freeing the prisoners and humiliating their captors, including Colonel Steven J.Lockjaw (Sean Penn, U TURN). Perfidia goes out of her way to degrade him sexually, beginning a sort of sadomasochistic relationship where he dedicates his life to surveilling/stalking/coercing her.

Later, when Perfidia gives birth to baby Charlene, she doesn’t let it slow down the revolution, even though Pat assumes it’s time to settle down. Perfidia gets caught while fleeing a bank robbery (which Junglepussy [Shayna McHayle, who it turns out is a rapper under that name] had compared to SET IT OFF) and, sadly, agrees under pressure to go into witness protection.

From the trailers I thought this was gonna be about former sixties revolutionaries, which I believe is what Vineland is about. It’s so much cooler that it’s the present, or maybe 15 minutes into the future, like Max Headroom. But some years do pass, because the arguably titular other big battle that happens after the first one is when Pat and teenage Charlene (movie rookie Chase Infiniti) are living pretty normal lives in hiding as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Bob tries to be a good father but his brain is pretty fried from drugs and alcohol, so Willa does her share of taking care of him. She doesn’t know the whole story but at least knows enough that when the security device Bob annoyingly makes her carry with her actually starts going off for the first time ever and a stranger named Deandra (Regina Hall, O’DESSA) approaches her in the school restroom she knows to listen.

Lockjaw has finally located them, and Deandra brings Willa to hide out in a convent, so much of the movie is about Bob trying to slip the authorities and reunite with his daughter. In painfully accurate to 2025 fashion the cops intentionally do immigration raids on nearby businesses as a distraction. They are straight up dressed as soldiers and flying in military helicopters that say “POLICE” on them. In other scenes they execute rebels on sight and send in an agent disguised as a protester to throw a molotov cocktail when they want to attack a protest. Seems accurate except the part about needing an excuse these days.

Bob runs to Willa’s karate sensei Sergio St. Carlos for help, and man did he go to the right guy. Since he’s played by Benicio del Toro (LICENCE TO KILL), has an “Eye of the Tiger” ringtone, and is never once seen doing karate from what I remember, I assumed he was gonna be kind of a buffoon. And he is definitely a funny character, but you quickly realize he’s the fuckin man. He locks up the dojo and takes Bob with him but he seems to be in charge of the community’s response to the immigration raids, so as he walks he’s talking to different people, giving them instructions and comfort, sending people to do tasks or directing them into secret tunnels, all the while also humoring this fucking idiot Bob who the whole time is freaking out about trying to get his phone charged.

I love that skaters are part of the resistance. They roll right up to Sensei Sergio’s car while he’s driving, tell him what’s up, he gives them a mission. I guess they’re parkour guys too – they leap nimbly across roof tops, attempting to spirit Bob to safety. I love how hilariously out of his depth he is with them and I love how when he falls off the roof it’s funny and then immediately after when they describe to Sergio what happened it’s just as funny.

By the way, I’m pretty sure the sign at the dojo calls it a ninja school. So it seems like you might be dealing with Chekhov’s ninja skills, but don’t get too excited. There’s a scene where Willa is practicing her kicks and it looks like she could really knock your head off. If I have one complaint about the movie (and I don’t) it’s that she doesn’t get to kick anybody. But she does do an extremely badass non-karate maneuver – I’ll go ahead and interpret it as being in a ninja spirit. It involves a unique, almost surreal car chase on desert roads that go up and down, making my stomach feel like I’m on a rollercoaster – I assume it’s an effect accomplished just by using the right lens? Good job cinematographer Michael Bauman (somehow this is only his second feature length movie, after LICORICE PIZZA).

In another sense Willa is just a normal, modern kid. Her friends are very normal; not ninjas. There’s a part where Bob asks about the pronouns of a non-binary friend (Colton Gantt) in a way that annoys Willa. “It’s not that hard!” she says. Which is all the discussion needed, really. (For what it’s worth, I think Bob is genuinely trying to be open to it.)

Though shot before some of The Shit We’re Dealing With Right Now, the movie depicts a fascist white nationalist government much like our own. Lockjaw’s cops seem much more competent and in better physical condition than I.C.E., but otherwise it’s the same concept: a militarized, fully deputized and unaccountable Ku Klux Klan terrorizing people of color in enemy “sanctuary cities.” Perhaps Anderson was being too optimistic in making the despicably racist motherfuckers who run things a secret society when right now we have Stephen Miller, the weird nosferatu motherfucker who masterminded this shit, going proudly goes Fox News to squawk paraphrases of famous Nazi speeches in the style of the most punchable motherfucker who ever lived chewing out the manager at one of the many establishments he’s been banned from. So I guess I’ll take this as a metaphor for how much the media pretends we don’t know for sure that actual straight up racists are running our country with actual straight up racist policies and goals. Here they’re working out of an office building, with weird rituals and codes. It’s diabolical because they’re called The Christmas Adventurers so later when we hear ordinary Christmas music it sounds racist. That’s what they do, too. They steal everything, including Jesus.

There are many great small characters I won’t have time to get into, but a particularly intriguing one is the bounty hunter Avanti Q (Eric Schweig, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS). He’ll do some foul shit but when asked to kill a kid he draws a line, which Lockjaw immediately understands, but he gets him to take some money just to deliver Willa to some skinheads. Here’s a moment where it’s entertaining in a traditional way – this guy is an enigmatic badass, he clearly feels uncomfortable as he’s leaving her to her doom, I start hoping he will have second thoughts. But I’m thinking no, this isn’t that type of movie. Then again there was this little part where Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn, Disney’s TARZAN) said Avanti was untrustworthy because he was “not a native son” and “not homegrown” – ironic choice of words since he describes him as “actually part Comanche or Eskimo.” Well, sure enough Avanti comes back to kill the guys that were gonna kill Willa. So really the reason they couldn’t trust him was not his race, but that he had one very small piece of his conscience still intact.

Lockjaw does not, and I’m just assuming Penn is gonna get another Oscar for this scorching portrayal of a raging, sentient testicle. Every cop/soldier in this movie looks like a real guy they tricked into playing himself in the movie – the kitted out, bearded burlymen with the face and build and presence of that particular type of dude – but their ultimate form is Lockjaw, the angry, terrified old man with giant veins popping out of his giant biceps popping out of his tiny shirt that gets made fun of and he assumes he’s being called gay. However you want to read that. THE MASTER is not my favorite PTA movie but one thing I liked about it was that Joaquin Phoenix kinda seemed like he was playing Popeye. Now Sean Penn looks even more like Popeye, but in a bad way. He is a man in violent denial of everything: his sexuality, his age, the limits of his body. His gravelly voice and overcompensating performance of cartoonish masculinity bring to mind RFK Jr., among other contemporary freaks.

Don’t worry, if you want to see him get his, you’re gonna see him get his. It’s a great scene that reminded me of the end of THE DEPARTED, except the beauty of that was the moment where Matt Damon sees Mark Wahlberg and knows that means he’s fucked. In this one it’s the opposite, that they go through the cruel trouble of telling him everything is fine and getting him excited about having his own office that he can use whenever he’s in town. He kicks his feet up on the desk, feeling so fulfilled, thinking he really made it. We know he’s fucked but he’s too dumb to figure it out.

I felt some satisfaction in the fact that this bastard has fucked up and gotten himself killed. But when you think about it for half a second you remember that The Christmas Adventurers are killing him not for any of his sins, but for the exact worst reason (he had sex with a Black woman), and more to the point they remain in power, nothing is fixed, this is not a happy ending.

There is obviously some discomfort in a white male director giving us a character like Perfidia, whose aggressive sexuality that tortures racists and recruits allies doesn’t exactly fit modern notions of positive representation. But man is she fun to watch, and Teyana seems like she’s gonna set the screen on fire with her intensity. I figure she too would’ve gotten an Oscar if she was in more of the movie.

Perfidia’s not the only character whose horniness is on display (or is their downfall), but at times it feels like the movie’s laying the blame for the movement’s failures at her feet. Like her fierce sense of liberation is hollow showmanship, a female Tyler Durden. But honestly that’s more like the reading I fear I should have than the one that actually came naturally while viewing. The way I took it was that Perfidia is for real – everything inspiring about her rebellious spirit and relentless fight for freedom is her authentic self, but also she’s just as weak and flawed as anybody else in the movie, or in life. In fact I found her so sympathetic that I was surprised to realize that Deandra and the nuns consider her a no-good rat who got their friends killed. Of course they’re right, but unlike them we were with her when it happened. For us it wasn’t the legend Perfidia Beverly Hills who fell, it was the person. We understood why the threats broke her, and at least she still had some fight in her. When she subsequently fled witness protection, Lockjaw, America, and the whole fuckin movie, that was the legend being the legend.

Like any of us, Perfidia and Bob did their best. It wasn’t enough but it was more than some people can muster. They lived their ideals more than most, they also fucked up bad. She was the better activist, he was the better parent. He thought it was time to ditch the revolution stuff and have a family, she couldn’t do that and went the other extreme. They didn’t know how to balance it and none of us do either. We want to fight this, we also want to just live this life that we’re fighting for, that we deserve to be able to have, but these fucking wackos get off on taking it from us. Willa’s a good kid, with the spirit of her parents but a better head on her shoulders. Maybe her generation will do better, even if her friends were just as weak as Bob’s. Anderson has to believe that. He has kids. I hope he’s right.

A refreshing and timely thing about ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is that it’s not some “well, when you really think about it the good guys can be pretty bad too” shit. Even though our heroes are fuckups they’re definitely the heroes. It goes without saying that the thugs locking up immigrants are evil motherfuckers, and that anyone who doesn’t absolutely suck shit is on the other side trying to stop them – duh. It’s as plain as day, we’re not stupid, we’re not barbarians, it doesn’t have to be explained to us that the sky is blue. I appreciate that.

At the same time, it’s a movie that knows it’s funny for the main character to go on the run from police, fall off a roof, get arrested, escape, be thrown out of a car, steal a car, go on a chase through the desert and find his daughter without ever changing out of his bathrobe. And also that it’s funny to do an extended riff on him absolutely not remembering any of the elaborate code words he was supposed to memorize and being mad on the phone about it. There’s definitely a little BIG LEBOWSKI in here, though not as much as in INHERENT VICE. I love that DiCaprio really made it as a sex symbol and leading man and now he’s more interested in playing sweaty, scraggly, sloppy doofuses. And he’s great at it!

However imperfect ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER may be as a blueprint for having correct politics and saving the world or whatever, it’s a very fucking funny and entertaining movie with a bold vision and a big heart. I adore it.