One Battle After Another Is Top-tier PTA

One Battle After Another is top-tier Paul Thomas Anderson — not as good as There Will Be Blood or Phantom Thread but so much better than the average movie that it seems to belong in a different medium entirely. It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character. Leonardo DiCaprio is its biggest star, playing a formerly radical explosives expert named Bob Ferguson who goes into hiding with his daughter in a small California town; his character provides the connective tissue between the giddy revolutionary action of the opening act to the hungover consequences of the next. But so much of the movie is about what happens around or despite Bob, a burnout with a brain so cooked by all the substances he’s spent the past decade and a half ingesting that he can no longer remember the code words to prove his identity when he reconnects with his old network. One Battle After Another is Anderson’s second riff on Thomas Pynchon, loosely inspired by his novel Vineland, but unlike the director’s first, Inherent Vice, this new film isn’t about the curdled aftermath of ’60s idealism. He untethers the story from the Reagan era and drags it into the 21st century, where his characters free migrants from detention centers and plant bombs in the offices of anti-abortion congressmen. Rather than ruminating on innocence lost, it presents the ebbs and flows of activism as part of a larger pattern. Participants wash out or sell out or get arrested, then get replaced by new blood, a cycle that comes with a measured optimism in addition to a body count.

In a more traditional film, Bob would be the hero and Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, the quiveringly intense caricature of military machismo played by Sean Penn, would be the villain — an outrageous action figure of a man with a T-shirt that clings so tightly to his bulging arms that it might as well have been molded on and a gait like his limbs are attached by hinges and manipulated by giant invisible hands. Bob, who spends much of his time in a thread-worn plaid bathrobe flailing wildly and flinging himself on the ground to crawl like a worm, is another fine contribution to the loser era DiCaprio has dedicated himself to lately. And Lockjaw is the best performance Penn has given in years — the particular mix of consternation and pride on his face as he gazes down at his foregrounded erection in an early scene like a man about to climb Mount Fuji should make his Oscars clip. Yet Anderson understands that the two characters are not just counterparts but fellow fools, men who have mistaken themselves for protagonists when they’re actually just tiny figures being tossed about by the tides of history. Another thing they share? An obsession with Perfidia Beverly Hills (a magnetic Teyana Taylor), the animating figure behind a militant organization called the French 75 and the most stunning subversive to flaunt an automatic weapon while heavily pregnant. Perfidia, who becomes involved with both men, does have main-character energy, and she leaves them bobbing around in her wake when she strides off the scene, abandoning her baby with Bob. 

Unlike Ari Aster, who tried a similar but less successful diagnosis of the current American spiritual ailment with Eddington, Anderson understands that someone can be a true believer in a righteous cause and still choose to save themself over their colleagues. Most notably, Perfidia is a fervent soldier who immediately turns on her crew when caught. But other activists also give in when faced with enormous pressure from a state that has no compunction about arranging killings and targeting family members. The film is gentle with those who’ve been compromised, an approach exemplified by the tenderness with which it frames Regina Hall’s tear-stained face in a wrenching moment as Deandra, a longtime agitator who comes to the rescue of Willa (Chase Infiniti), Bob’s daughter, when Lockjaw finally tracks her and her father down. It’s not martyrs who give their movement strength but numbers, the people willing to fill the streets and flesh out the ranks when others fall. One of the greatest and most intricate sequences in One Battle After Another involves Bob engaging in a customer-service squabble with an underground hotline while an unflappable Benicio del Toro, playing dojo owner Sergio St. Carlos, works around him to get the migrants he has been sheltering to safety while providing his guest with a rifle and a Modelo. As Lockjaw descends on the town, having invented pretexts for a military invasion that’s actually about his wiping out proof of his past interracial entanglements, shop owners and skateboarders and hospital workers all reveal themselves to be part of an organized force working to help those in need.

Willa, played by first-timer Infiniti with a clear-eyed, stirring gravitas that belies her age, is among that force, though she has spent most of her life believing her father was paranoid rather than actually in danger of being hunted down. There are times when One Battle After Another owes as much to Terminator 2: Judgment Day as it does to Pynchon in its depiction of a teen being raised by a seemingly fanatical parent who is convinced dark forces are out to get them. For all that the film revels in satire — a powerful white-nationalist secret society is Christmas themed, and its members greet one another with “Hail, St. Nick!” — it’s electric when it veers into action, and a chase sequence on a series of cresting hills manages to both reference and stand up to the one in which the T-1000 pursues John Connor into the L.A. River. Willa, in her taffeta skirt and leather jacket, turns out to be the champion the film is waiting for, though it’s not because of who her parents are or how she has been raised but because of what she proves herself willing to do. One Battle After Another would never be so trite as to declare that the kids will save us. Rather, it proposes that while the fight will never be over, there will always be new volunteers ready to take it up, if only we let them.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the September 22, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.

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