We the people declare a revolution through the arts; a force powerful enough to push change in our politics, our economy, and our culture itself. Paul Thomas Anderson captures that urgency in his bold, unruly, and unflinching new film, One Battle After Another.
Anderson situates his latest work at the volatile intersection of politics, performance, and protest, presenting a vision of America where revolution is both weapon and inheritance. The film opens with an electrifying entrance: Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills, striding down a deserted highway with the swagger of a runway model, en route to her next mission with the radical collective French 75. Their credo, “Revolutionary bodies is the only way” is not merely a slogan but a philosophy engraved into the marrow of its members, who strike against banks, politicians, and power grids in pursuit of systemic upheaval.
Among them is Perfidia’s partner, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), whose expertise in explosive devices is used to jailbreak detained immigrants, establishing the French 75 as insurgents of justice. Anderson’s ensemble is richly textured: Regina Hall as Deandra, a maternal yet merciless tactician; Wood Harris as Laredo, a nostalgic callback to his role in The Wire; Alana Haim as Mae West, embodying disarmingly naïve defiance; and Shayna McHayle, credited under her indelible stage name Junglepussy. Collectively, they comprise not a band of caricatures but a chorus of conviction, each voice carrying the timbre of resistance.
Their insurgency collides with Steven “Lockjaw” (Sean Penn), a commanding officer whose obsession with domination, both political and sexual, renders him a grotesque embodiment of state violence. His perverse fixation on Perfidia produces a transactional relationship where freedom is bartered against exploitation. Lockjaw is Anderson’s most searingly satirical figure: a “white savior” archetype unmasked as predator, racist, and fetishist. Penn’s performance is horrifyingly precise, his tics and grotesqueries so naturalistic they blur the line between acting and inhabitation. Lockjaw’s ascension into the Christmas Adventurers Club, a clandestine white supremacist society cloaked in absurd rituals of “Saint Nick” worship, renders satire as both comic and corrosive. Their chants of “deploy that town for drugs and tacos” crystallize Anderson’s critique of America’s bureaucratized bigotry, where racism and xenophobia are masked as policy.
Sixteen years later, the narrative pivots to intergenerational legacy. Ghetto Pat, now softened into Bob, has become a fiercely protective father to Wila (Chase Infiniti), his daughter with Perfidia. Wila is a figure of resilience: a studious, self-possessed teenager whose very existence testifies to a lineage of revolution. Though Perfidia is absent, her spirit permeates Wila’s life mythologized as a war hero, only later unmasked as a traitor. Labeled a “baby rat,” Wila embodies the cruel burden of inherited identity. Yet, in moments of peril, her composure evokes her mother’s implacable strength, suggesting resistance can be gestated, carried in the womb, and reborn in new form.
Costume design becomes a site of continuity and rupture. Bob’s faded plaid robe recalls a flashback of Perfidia pregnant in plaid, a visual tether binding past to present. Wila’s ensemble, a ballerina skirt offset by a biker jacket and combat boots, materializes her dual inheritance of delicacy and defiance. When Lockjaw mocks her lack of makeup at a school dance, it is less a critique than a revelation: without maternal guidance, her coming-of-age lacks the ritual adornments of femininity. Bob’s plaintive confession: “I can’t do her hair. I don’t know how to do her hair, man,” is piercing in its simplicity, encapsulating both paternal devotion and its limits.
The film extends beyond the domestic to chart a larger cartography of resistance. Benicio del Toro, as Sensei Sergio, guides both Bob and Wila while simultaneously stewarding an underground “sanctuary city” for immigrants. Anderson frames Sergio as a latter-day Harriet Tubman, an architect of survival networks in the face of systemic annihilation. The portrait of Superman in his dojo serves as a reminder that even the quintessential American hero is an alien, and becomes emblematic of the immigrant struggle. Del Toro’s performance, restrained yet resolute, embodies resilience as quiet insistence rather than grand gesture.
Thematically, One Battle After Another interrogates freedom, radical activism, and the intergenerational toll of resistance. As this story is perfectly stitched together, Anderson wields every cinematic tool with precision. Performance is the spine of the film’s architecture. The ensemble is not interchangeable; every actor’s presence feels essential, their absence keenly felt. Taylor and Hall, though not omnipresent, cast indelible shadows. Their absence becomes dramaturgy, their legacies sculpting arcs for protagonist and antagonist alike.
Jonny Greenwood’s score is a pulse running underneath everything, not just as background noise but as bloodstream. Every snap, crackle, and pop is sharp, restless, and relentless. During the Bakton Cross escape, it doesn’t just heighten the intensity; it accelerates time itself, propelling the film’s three-hour runtime into a breathless, propulsive. Cinematographer Michael Bauman brings Anderson’s vision of California to life as both tapestry and battlefield; storefronts, murals, and even background extras carry narrative weight, embedding the revolution into the landscape itself. The location and set design, down to product placement and wall art, reinforce a society where rebellion infiltrates even the ordinary.
One Battle After Another is not merely a film; it is a manifesto. Satirical yet sincere, ferocious yet deeply humane, it insists that art is not passive reflection but active resistance. It interrogates power and inheritance, wrestles with the costs of survival, and suggests that rebellion is as much an interior reckoning as exterior action. Anderson has delivered his most politically resonant work to date, one destined to be dissected, debated, and remembered for generations.
