These are curious and perilous times we live in, the kind that call for courage and perseverance on all fronts. It can be exhausting, even if you’re not trying to take down the establishment or have long since given up the righteous fight. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a lot of things: a parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all-stars to get their best eccentricity on, the single greatest film of 2025, a movie that’s less a VistaVision adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland than a passing nod to the author on the way to its own profound insights.
Above all, it’s an act of resistance, both the lower-case and capital-R type, that suggests it may have an answer as to how we battle through this onslaught against our better angels. But first, a few things need to get blown the fuck up.
Luckily, this woozy, winding epic has a handful of people on deck who are willing to do exactly that. They’re the French 75, a loose organization of self-appointed urban freedom fighters led, more or less, by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). The group has targeted an immigration holding center in San Diego, in what they hopes will be the first salvo in a revolution. They need to make an “announcement,” which is where “the Rocketman” comes in. He’s Pat, a.k.a. Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), and specializes in weapons, bombmaking, creating a big noise. After the 75 slip into the camp under the cover of darkness, he’s tasked with providing the fireworks. It’s a display of pageantry designed to complement Perfidia’s war-cry mantra: “Free borders, free bodies, free choices and free from fuckin’ fear!” You could say the same thing about the sequence itself, which Anderson stages like a spectacle in miniature, complete with a rallying, second-hand rush. We’re only 10 minutes in, and already at a full gallop.
Meanwhile, Perfidia needs to neutralize the person in charge, a military colonel named Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). He’s a hardass with a hard-on for power — this is not a colloquialism; Lockjaw is in a priapic state when we meet him — and takes the indignity of being imprisoned in his own prison extremely personally. The gent with the bad alt-right haircut is also a Neo-Nazi who nonetheless recognizes a fellow warrior in Perfidia, and a mixture of contempt and lust envelopes the rat bastard like a shroud. Lockjaw vows that they will meet again, and makes good on his promise. He’s one third of a triangle that will involve him, Perfidia and Pat. It ends with a baby, a bank robbery gone bad, and the French 75’s leader being put in the Witness Protection Program before flying that particular coop to parts unknown.
This is merely One Battle After Another’s appetizer course, a way of setting the stage for the struggle and the stakes to come. Fast-forward 16 years later and, as the voiceover tells us, “the world has changed very little.” Still, times moves forward. Perdidia remains in the wind. Pat has become an every-stoner named “Bob,” having lived underground in the fictional Northern California town of Baktan Cross and raised his baby in peace for well over a decade. That infant is now a teenager named Willa (Chase Infiniti), practicing her martial-arts moves in a dojo as Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” plays on the soundtrack.
[A quick aside about the music: Johnny Greenwood’s score could not be better suited to PTA’s vision of a broken America or the constant forward momentum of the film’s pacing, whether he’s arranging symphonic bursts of strings or utilizing a single, insistent piano note plunked for maximum tension. These two continue to have the sort of divinely simpatico creative relationship that ranks up there with Spielberg and John Williams, or Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann. And yet, when you see this introduction scene set to the Can’t Buy a Thrill track, you’re reminded that this is same filmmaker who gave us that pitch-perfect “He Needs Me” cue in Punch Drunk Love and a whole K-Tel compilation’s worth of hits to reflect the ever-changing moods of Boogie Nights. It’s enough to make you weep. Nobody knows how to utilize a needle-drop better.
And Lockjaw? He’s trying to gain entry into the rancid elite via a group known as the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, made up of millionaire string-pullers yearning for a world of racial purity and those “American-born by gentile,” yadda yadda yadda. First, however, he has to track down Bob and Willa, and tie up loose ends. And blessed with a lot of soldiers and firepower that may be from one of many independent militias or may be from the U.S. government itself — six of one these days — Lockjaw is determined to see his mission through. The character’s name is not just highly Pynchonesque but very well-earned, by the way; Penn plays this obsessive man as a walking, talking balled fist, with ramrod posture and a permanent expression of distaste. It’s an expert portrait of self-loathing and redirected rage, and a reminder that though the actor has been more selective about taking on screen gigs, he’s still a strong contender for GOAT status. Penn knows exactly how to walk the line between caricature and the truthful cracking open of someone determined to stay locked on target. This is best-in-show work.
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We’ve barely even skimmed the surface of this heady mix of father figures and bad dads, underground railroads and war machines, secret societies and state-sanctioned violence. One Battle After Another is truly one stunning, thrumming bit of business after another, blessed with DiCaprio’s manic take on paranoid parental guidance, understated supporting turns from Regina Hall and Benicio Del Toro as allies to the cause, and enough detours through the source material to capture the literary giant’s vibe. (A trip to the weed-growing convent run by the Sisters of the Brave Beaver comes straight from the text, with near-verbatim exchanges.) There’s a serious flexing of chops on display, notably during some cross-cutting between two opposing camps before a raid and two different, equally kinetic car chases. Yet it’s never virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake. Anderson is intent on telling a story, not blithely showing off. If this ambitious tale of familial bonds and institutional might also offers a rebuke to the idea that the movies are a thing of the past and should just go gently into the night, that’s a bonus. It’s a giant, fit-to-burst attempt to be as intimate as possible.
PTA has, of course, tackled T. Pynchon before, and nailed the writer’s signature funky absurdism — one part motormouthed Fred Allen, three parts the Furry Freak Brothers — with his 2014 film Inherent Vice. Here, he’s using the book as a springboard for what feels like his own fixations and preoccupations, his personal feelings of empathy and outrage. Vineland takes place squarely in Reagan’s 1980s, with burnt-out 1960s radicals. Battle is not tied to any particular era, any particular revolution. The filmmaker has both stripped the narrative down and somehow exponentially complicated things by unmooring it from the period — it’s set in a timeless, perpetual present that feels uncomfortably like America circa right now. That’s why the first half feels like a declaration of war, bustling with a sense that some sort of flip-the-bird action is needed, and the back half makes you sympathize with everyone’s frazzled, desperate exhaustion.
And yet: there’s hope in them thar Northern California hills, which brings us back to that aforementioned answer. In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.
From Rolling Stone US
