One Battle After Another (2025)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson
Music: Jonny Greenwood
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Alana Haim, Wood Harris
Plot: The fading revolutionary Bob lives in a haze of confused paranoia, surviving on the margins of society with his lively, independent daughter Willa. When, after sixteen years, his sworn enemy resurfaces and Willa disappears, the former radical militant is driven into a desperate search. Father and daughter must face the consequences of his past together.
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Antonio Gramsci once wrote that “every revolutionary movement is romantic, by definition.” It’s hard to imagine Thomas Pynchon—or even less so Paul Thomas Anderson—ever coming across that line, and yet in One Battle After Another (directed by Anderson), as already in Vineland (Pynchon’s 1990 novel on which the film is based), revolution and romanticism are inseparable: two forces that chase each other endlessly, like utopia paired with disillusionment, like collective euphoria shadowed by individual melancholy.
To avoid misunderstandings: One Battle After Another is by no means a sentimental film. If anything, it is probably Anderson’s most wandering, farcical, and disjointed work. But romanticism—understood as the impulse that brings forth emotions, bonds, and wounds that never truly heal—is the engine of the story and the glue (and wedge) between the characters. And perhaps precisely in Gramsci’s sense: not as emotional ornament, but as the energy that drives every attempt at change, even the most unruly, even those doomed from the outset.
This is a romanticism that doesn’t exhaust itself in private feelings, but widens into an awareness of time, a sensitivity to the world and the era one inhabits. A romanticism broad enough to encompass every dimension of existence: love for a person—be it partner, child, or parent—for a cause, even when it seems out of reach, and, of course, for freedom itself.
The story follows Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a revolutionary who, in the late 2000s, joins the collective French 75—a group devoted to acts of sabotage and disruption against immigrant detention centers across the United States. At first, Bob is drawn to the movement less out of ideology than by his attraction to its leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Over time, however, his skills as a former bomb maker make him one of the group’s key figures. An intense relationship develops between him and Perfidia: they have a daughter together and attempt to build a shared life.
But the constant pressure from the FBI—particularly from Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a white supremacist obsessed with Perfidia, especially in a sexual sense—combined with her growing rejection of bourgeois domesticity, ultimately drives them apart. Sixteen years later, in the present, Bob lives under a false identity with his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He has abandoned the cause and withdrawn into an isolated, outcast existence. Lockjaw, however, has never stopped hunting him, and his reappearance sets off a chain of events that forces Bob, Perfidia, and Willa alike to confront the past.
As the plot suggests, One Battle After Another is a genre film which, though carrying traces of the Californian director’s signature style, looks unlike anything else in his body of work. Not even Inherent Vice—often cited by critics because of their shared Pynchonian roots—really provides a comparison, since the two differ markedly in tone and structure. Anderson takes the events of Vineland and shifts them forward by forty years: the first half now unfolds around 2010 instead of the 1960s, while the second is set in the present rather than the mid-1980s. The result is a historical backdrop stripped of revolutionary character, turning the story into a kind of abstraction, almost a dystopia: a space-time that feels elusive, undefinable, suspended, unstable, and faintly uncanny.
It is, and at the same time is not, today’s America. On one hand, the contemporary references are unmistakable—the militarized control of immigration, the radical and polarized political passions, the racist undercurrent as both tradition and engine of the nation’s founding. On the other, none of this becomes a straightforward mirror of Trump-era America. It’s as if Anderson is uninterested in producing a direct, tightly framed portrait—unlike Ari Aster with Eddington, which ends up presenting a vision of the United States as closed-off and muddled, more navel-gazing than genuinely political. Instead, Anderson seeks to probe history itself: a history of his country that resists being told or reduced to synthesis.
As in There Will Be Blood and The Master, Anderson chooses to scatter his narrative across space and time—whether real or imagined—crafting a trajectory that refuses to arrive at a destination (except in the minimal sense required by genre convention).
His Bob, alias Ghetto Pat, embodies all of this: a kind of twenty-first-century Lebowski (and after all, the Coens’ film already carried clear Pynchonian echoes), who thinks, acts, and moves clumsily, without direction and seemingly without ideals. He is the embodiment of revolutionary failure, yet also its only conceivable answer. For the counterrevolutionary world around him looks just as broken and moribund: like Lockjaw, with his mechanical body and his crude ideals—ideals he cannot even manage to uphold—doomed to collapse.
Like in a twilight western—the genre that, more than any other, seems to underlie One Battle After Another—what emerges is precisely this world in decay, which Anderson paints almost as a geographical journey: from labyrinthine cityscapes to rural backwaters, and finally to the desert, where an extraordinary car chase closes the film. The scene is more than just a tribute to the genre; it takes on an almost abstract resonance. Through long lenses that alternately reveal and conceal the cars as they dip behind the ridges of the California desert, Anderson portrays an infinite space that folds in on itself, offering only the illusion of vastness while tightening the trap around his characters.
If there were a single image to encapsulate the film, it would be that of the muscle cars shot in extreme long distance, blurred as they race through heat mirages on the asphalt, grain flickering across the 35mm frame. In that visual tremor lies the irresolution of the story: myth breaking apart, outlines dissolving, the image refusing clarity and polish. As though pointing to something that cannot truly be narrated or shown, much like Bob’s own memories, clouded by drugs and alcohol.
What Anderson portrays is a country for old men, one that resembles the cinema of the 1990s so closely it seems to embody its very spirit. Bob—carried by DiCaprio’s body and nearly the director’s contemporary—stands in for nothing less than his disenchanted generation, ready for normalization, capable now of retreating only into personal bonds (with Willa as both the motor and gravitational center of the story). And yet, even knowing his revolution has ended, that there is no more room or time to begin again, when he finds himself alongside Sensei Sergio—karate master and leader of a cell defending undocumented immigrants, played by Benicio Del Toro—cornered by the police, he still manages to utter the one line he believes in, the one that still carries a trace of hope: “¡Viva la revolución!”
Lorenzo Rossi, Cineforum, September 24, 2025
