One Battle After Another review - Paul Thomas Anderson satirises America's culture wars

Paul Thomas Anderson’s frantic One Battle After Another is a storm warning for a fascist America and both a lament and a rallying call for revolutionary fervour.

Unfurling in the early Obama years and the near future, it’s a late ‘60s/early ‘70s West Coast throwback that channels a gutsy female Black Panthers vibe, Bullitt-style car chases, and an Altmanesque gallery of fanatics and smooth operators on either side of the political divide. It might be the best Hollywood film of 2025; ahead of next year’s Midterm Elections, nothing can touch it as the movie of the historical moment.

Extrapolated from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and thus Anderson’s second crack at Pynchon following the gonzo Inherent Vice, One Battle initially centres on a mismatched couple, fierce Black insurgency leader Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and the less radicalised diversions expert “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) – she’s a warrior, he lights fireworks.

In the bravura opening sequence, their guerrilla unit French 75 raids an immigration detention centre on the California-Mexico border, catches the ICE-like guards snoozing, and releases the captives. Perfidia neutralizes the uptight enemy commander, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) by inspiring his fly-straining erection. Thus enslaved, the Kubrickian military man is incensed when, subsequently spying on the unit members though his field glasses, he sees Pat canoodling with the perpetually horny Perfidia. (Pictured below: Teyana Taylor)

With the unit ratcheting up its attacks and bombings, Lockjaw traps Perfidia in a toilet stall. He’ll let her go – “I don’t care what you do,” this true patriot says – if she agrees to meet him in a hotel. Sensing she can manipulate him, she takes him as her lover. Like many a plantation-owner, Lockjaw is a white supremacist who lusts after Black women, though it’s the dom in Perfidia that turns him on.

Not that Anderson sanctifies her (or resists poking fun at the rads’ behavioural and verbal quirks). Nine or more months after the hotel tryst, Perfidia gives birth to a daughter, whom she abandons to her mother and Pat so she can resume her militant activities. That family means more to Pat than a cause facing prodigious odds is presented as a sound moral value. As a Calhoun, he must be of Scottish or Irish descent, but his inheritance of brutal oppression doesn’t engender as much rage in him as Perfidia’s does in her.

After a bank heist led by Perfidia and her flamboyant sister-in-arms Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle) goes awry – echoing the 1981 Brink’s robbery by the Black Liberation Army and former Weather Underground members – Lockjaw captures Perfidia and forces her to rat on her colleagues. Interactions in the movie between black women and white men carry huge metaphorical weight, embodying as they do the contest between racial hatred and interracial harmony.

As the state police start wiping out Perfidia's old friends, she enters a witness protection program. Despite her absence from the movie, It doesn’t sag because her energy passes to her 16-year-old, Willa (Chase Infiniti), whom “Bob Ferguson” (as Pat is now known) has creditably raised in a sanctuary city foxhole, despite his having become a drugs-and-booze addled slob in the intervening years. Portraying weak, tractable men, like his Killers of the Flower Moon character and Pat/Bob here, DiCaprio leaves a longer lasting impression than he often does when playing cocky Alphas. (Pictured below: Chase Infiniti)

Paranoid, antic, and violent, One Battle’s second half – think Zabriskie Point,The Parallax View, and Traffic reconstituted as a Road Runner cartoon – sees Lockjaw turn his attention to Willa, not because she’s grown up an angry badass in her mother’s mould, but because he has personal reasons for eliminating her.

His success busting ethnic radical cadres and his promotion to colonel has earned him an opportunity to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, an elite brotherhood of racist Christian fascists. Sleek good ol’ boys with complacent smiles, they've borrowed their extermination and corpse disposal method from the Nazi death camps. Anderson implies that genocide could happen in the US; it wouldn’t be the first time.

To join the august company of these nouveau Klansmen, Lockjaw must be free of any Black “taint”. As he strives to remove the proof of where he formerly dipped his wick, Anderson gleefully uglifies him into Elmer Fudd with Yosemite Sam's apoplectic fury. Penn is very game – Lockjaw might be the son of the rancid psycho sergeant he played in Casualties of War.

Bob, in turn, creakily regenerates himself as a revolutionary by joining forces with Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s sensei and a community leader who transports immigrants to safety – a character so effortlessly cool he must be making Quentin Tarantino jealous. Vertigo's vertiginous rooftop chase must have inspired the scene in which Bob wheezily tries to keep up with three of Sergei’s fleet disciples, a misadventure that costs him one of his nine lives.

More of them are threatened by his search for the missing Willa, the film's avatar of future resistance. Despite the intervention of the loyal French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall), the girl winds up being pursued at breakneck speed by the villains over an undulating desert road, her desperate dad in tow – the transfixing sequence encapsulating the entire three-hour roller-coaster. Underpinning it, Jonny Greenwood’s score uses the same racing cellos that rendered 2016's "Burn the Witch”, Radiohead’s most chilling song, and one that's fully in keeping with Anderson’s film, as funny and exciting as it is.

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