Paul Thomas Anderson's 'One Battle After Another' Is Gonna Make Republicans Go Absolutely Nuts

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the movie of the year. Should I just stop there? I could! Because when a movie knocks your socks off like this, it’s tempting to not want to oversell it; to give your readers the same chance you had, which is the thrill of dawning excitement that this, this is the one! Unfortunately for my therapist and everyone I know, I can’t control everything, so your reactions and the cycles of pro versus con conversations that will come to devour “awards season chatter” (and please at least exempt me from that phrase, I beg you) will carry this movie—excuse me, this masterpiece—where it may.

(As an aside, I have in the past deplored the use of the word “masterpiece” to describe any movie younger than around five years old—a genuine “masterpiece” needs time and age to ferment—but two viewings in, I simply cannot summon up a single shred of doubt about this one. If this isn’t what defines a masterpiece, then we should just start burning the dictionaries.)

It’s not like I went into One Battle After Another with low expectations. I’m firmly of the mind that PTA has never made a single not-great movie. Not a single. (No, not even that one.) But I can and will say that the idea of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn in this, the year of somebody’s lord, 2025, is not exactly a thing that was setting my pre-show pantaloons ablaze. I hadn’t even bothered to watch the trailer.

And yet. And yet! And m-f’ing yet. Ten minutes into One Battle After Another, I’m pretty sure every hair on my body was standing on end and saluting. And those poor follicles didn’t get to rest for days after. They were tired, but still, oh, how they wept with joy! Walking out of the theater after this was electric with that buzz that only a killer movie experience can deliver—if your drug of choice is Movies, then One Battle After Another will have you high as hell. Heavenly as that.

Funny, political, action-packed, and as timely as they come, Anderson weaves this epic of modern-day rad-as-hell Antifa revolutionaries from within full-on god beast mode. Everything from Jonny Greenwood’s shrieking, quaking, and quivering insta-classic score to Michael Bauman’s fierce camera work to Anderson’s own killer script to each and every member of this astonishing cast of actors is firing on all cylinders. But this is truly the spectacle of a master (or perhaps, as one of his previous films posited, The Master) who’s perfected every facet of their craft, calibrating each piston to the millisecond and loosing her to scorch flames straight down the pavement. Burn, baby, burn.

So as I said up there in that first paragraph—god forbid I oversell this thing.

Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 book Vineland (about former hippies surviving 1980s Reagan-ville), One Battle After Another stars a maybe never better Leonardo DiCaprio as … well he’s got several names and nicknames across the run of the film but for our purposes we’ll go with Bob, as that’s the name he spends most of the film with. When we first meet him, Bob is a member of the French-75, a group of left-wing revolutionaries in Los Angeles. Bob is just one hoodie-headed cog in the rebel machine alongside many, including, excuse me, most importantly, one Perfidia Beverly Hills— played by Teyana Taylor, who, well, saying this is a “star turn” from Taylor is like calling a supernova a gas leak. (P.S. If you’ve never seen Taylor in 2023’s A Thousand and One, fix that immediately. What a talent.) Together, these two and their kick-ass compatriots (heyyy Alana Haim in a black bob wig) rob and/or blow up banks to fund their real efforts—blowing as big of holes as they can manage into the sides of this f**ked-up system of ours.

And please do believe that this film isn’t shy about taking a side—watching wishy-washy so-called “political” movies (a la Alex Garland’s Civil War) has become an incessant thorn in my side these past several godawful years, but One Battle After Another is 100% “f**k Yeah Antifa!” (I very much liked Eddington, but one can’t help but summon up the image of Ari Aster walking out of One Battle After Another going, “f**kkkkkkkkk!”) Even using the term “Antifa,” I’m hesitant—one doesn’t want to give our current Fascists-in-Chief fuel for their anti-speech clampdowns. And all the while One Battle After Another breezes on by, not a solitary f**k to give. Blow it right up, Jungle P——!

Which isn’t to say the film shies from the hardness of militant living. Hell, it’s the entire thesis of the piece. It’s in the title. How do we keep going against this endless barrage of awfulness? It knows a maintaining of selfhoods—life and love and oh god I’m gonna say it, laughter—is integral to our fight.

But from its opening scene—which sees the French-75 liberating immigrants from one of the Border Wall-adjacent internment camps you can see pictures of any day in the real world news—One Battle After Another never ignores what our fight is against. Who the real bad guys are. It just puts it all in a package so enlivening, so hysterically funny and sexy and entertaining, that it’s gonna make Republicans go absolutely nuts. My heart sings. God bless, it’s beautiful.

Although even in the movie, The Man doesn’t want us to have beautiful things. So after its opening passages gift us with the vicarious revolutionary thrills that our souls have been begging for in the age of limp-ass Chuck Schumer bullsh**, we find ourselves thrust 16-ish years into its future. The fight’s still raging, only we’re all older and less sexy and way more exhausted about it. (And yeah, I felt that.) Bob’s now in hiding and raising his and Perfidia’s teen daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, spectacular)—only an old foe called Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is now burning up their tail, and he’s got the full force of the Federal Government at his trigger fingers.

Already a gift of a character on the page—Anderson has always had a way with character names, but my god that name—what Penn does with Lockjaw is akin to possession. Titanic work from his jarhead ears to his high-heeled boots. This is Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men caliber work—an actor and a character detonating in the place where they entangle. And keep in mind this is coming from a life-long Penn agnostic—he’s never been this good. (That he seems to be channeling Cotton Hill, Hank’s half-legged father on King of the Hill, is only part of the charm.)

On his opposite, thankfully loosed from his quest to win an Oscar, what Leo is doing here isn’t at all easy but he sure-fire makes it look that way. Bob, too, is a perfect marriage of star and form—everything we associate with the brand that is “Leo” tweaked and tuned to perfection. Reveling in his strengths while also upending them and showing us 100% brand new sh** from a now creased with familiarity face. Anderson’s as good at keying into the essence of any specific movie star as Alfred Hitchcock once was—but then it’s not just the stars. It’s the character actors who fill the screen beside them, and it’s the newcomers whose introduction to the world comes via the stratosphere.

So yes, all three whizz-bang hours of One Battle After Another do seem to be barreling toward an eventual High-Noon-esque confrontation between our two big movie stars at opposite edges of the frame. But by the time we’re running around with Benicio Del Toro as the “Sensei” Sergio St. Carlos or suppressing a soulful fury with Regina Hall as a fellow former French-75-er Deandra—or making this Magnolia-head whoop a hearty huzzah at the reunion between Anderson and actress April Grace—you’ll be damned if you’re keeping your eye on that ball. The path toward the last act is so surprising and full of life in every corner of every frame that at a certain point, you’ll have completely submitted to the ride.

And what a ride. There are already at this moment Film History Books aching for their missing chapters on the three-car chase scene that caps off this cinematic experience. Not only because of how it’s filmed—although every camera operator on this film should be bought a beer or drink-of-their-choice for what they accomplished here until the day they die. It’s also because we’re so entirely emotionally invested in what’s happening by this moment in the movie that it’s earned every ounce of its show-off-iness. If you don’t feel your foot instinctively pressing down on the gas pedal from your theater seat, then you just might be one of those awful Republicans I mentioned earlier. And don’t do that, please. Don’t make me beg or throw bombs. Just speed us around that next bend and make us feel like there’s hope in humanity still, PTA!