One Battle After Another Review: Leonardo DiCaprio Lights Political Fire

There is a school of thought that views the whole of human existence, from the cave dwellers who discovered fire to the skyscraper and smartphone-designers of today, as an expansive cycle of guys trying to impress gals. There’s plenty of reason to be dubious about this broad generalization, not least of all because it removes the contributions of women from the equation. Yet it would seem Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most compelling and idiosyncratic filmmakers of his generation, recognizes a truth in its margins—at least insofar as some blokes are concerned.

One Battle After Another, PTA’s new audacious epic, even begins as a sly comedy rooted in this neolithic logic. For here is the story of two dudes that inhabit opposite poles on the modern American political spectrum, and they’re trying anxiously to win the approval (or attention) of one badass Black revolutionary woman. All the havoc, anguish, and ultimately transcendent cinema that follows leaps from that initial desperation. The wreckage it leaves behind is so severe that multiple generations will be forced to pick up the pieces. Yet the same legacy also marks one of the most breathtakingly subversive films I have seen released by a major American studio in my lifetime. The very fact this film exists in the current climate of 2025 feels like an act of heresy. Hallelujah, cinema saints be praised.

The triangle which makes this Hollywood miracle possible consists of: Perfidia (a ferocious Teyana Taylor), a far-left militant revolutionary whose parents and grandparents were likely burning down one kind of institution or another; her bomb-maker hanger on, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), who from his greasy ponytail to innocuous name seems barely able to hold her gaze even while quoting the gospel of Chomsky between tokes off his joint; and finally Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military shirt so stuffed that he looks and sounds like a G.I. Joe action figure that went to seed 40 years ago. It is also Lockjaw who arguably gets the plot going since he and Perfidia have a meet-cute in the film’s opening scene when she holds him at gunpoint while breaking out the undocumented immigrants Lockjaw has rounded up in cages.

Yes. That’s right. The movie begins with the violent overthrow of a Homeland Security camp where a concentration of “illegals” is liberated. That is is also where our comically-named soldier boy gets a hard-on for a Black woman and then obsesses over her for the rest of the movie. And none of this is a crude exaggeration; Anderson puts the salute in extreme close-up. At a glance, the same PTA who spotted flickers of warm domesticity in the adult film industry of Boogie Nights, or scathingly summarized American capitalism via the sound of Daniel Day-Lewis slurping up a milkshake in There Will Be Blood, is again up to mischief with the American psyche. A radical woman inspires devotion and wanton lust from two diametrically-opposed men, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to square this away with their alleged political maxims. On a certain level, it could even risk being a dreaded “both sides” analogy.

Fortunately, I should note several paragraphs deep, everything so far described is the prologue. The title card for this nearly three-hour movie hasn’t even dropped, nor the real story begun. Nevertheless, much of the table-setting consists of some of Anderson’s tensest and kinkiest flourishes where an encounter between Perfidia and Lockjaw leads to late night rendezvouses in hotels and later regrets. People are messy, but how they confront that mess, and live with it, cannot be overlooked or diminished. And after Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl who could be either man’s progeny—and yet most definitely is Pat’s daughter—the real tools come to bear. Lockjaw rains scorched earth down on Perfidia and her French 75 revolutionary group. In the fallout, Pat loses everything, changes his name to Bob, and daughter Charlene’s to Willa. Sixteen years later, they’re still living by these aliases, with teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) being none the wiser… until Lockjaw comes calling again.

According to Anderson, One Battle After Another was originally born from his dream of making a “chase movie.” That narrative is there, but in function it is closer to the grand lyricism, and seedy evil, of something like Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter as opposed to Mad Max or The Fugitive. Like Robert Mitchum singing “Leaning” while stalking his stepchildren in Hunter, One Battle pivots on an all-time sinister big screen villain—Penn is indeed a personification of white American hegemony and hypocrisy in one of the best turns of his career—pursuing his shame across the American West. However, the film is about more than sudden unexpected swerves into white-knuckle tension. The movie cartwheels, in fact, between various tones, vibes, and aesthetics, like a child who remains incredulously dry while skidding through puddles.

There has never been a PTA picture as plot-driven as One Battle After Another, which in a nutshell is the story of DiCaprio’s middle-aged dad trying to find his daughter after she’s gone to ground. He’s also facing the the ticking clock presented by Penn’s pharisee in camouflage fatigues. But from the bone-deep exhaustion scrawled across DiCaprio’s brow, and the carnage that decades of cheeba have written there, the movie still finds time to say so much more. With its massive and faintly indulgent length, One Battle finds just as much space to be a hang-out movie about a washout radical 20 years after his underground burrow got boarded up.

One of the best bits in the picture is a running gag about DiCaprio being unable to get assistance from his former comrade-in-arms because poor Bob’s weed-addled brain has turned to mush. Nearly 20 years later, he absolutely cannot remember the password games French 75 call centers still use like they’re in a Sean Connery Bond flick. But that means no help will be forthcoming, and DiCaprio’s rising fury and exasperation becomes a Vaudevillian wordplay comedy.

As one of the last contemporary Gen-X legends DiCaprio has yet to collaborate alongside, Anderson appears to savor finally working with DiCaprio. Still the director subverts expectations, revealing that he is far more interested in tapping into DiCaprio’s underutilized talent for inhabiting dimwits with slow-roiling rage. It’s a wryly funny turn, even as the film empathizes greatly with his life-or-death plight. He might be a father out to save his daughter, but the movie doesn’t truly belong to him.

The real heart of the film, and the emotional counterweight to the narrative’s heinous villain, turns out to really be newcomer Infiniti as Willa. More than just a young actor who can hold her own in scenes opposite DiCaprio and Penn, Infiniti embodies Anderson’s most earnest intentions. She and the film insist that hope and aspirations for a better future are not simply affectations, or a persona you can don and discard like the all-American squareness Lockjaw pretends to swear by when in the company of fellow white masters of the universe. In this way, Willa is not just the film’s MacGuffin when she’s sprinting across desert landscapes in 70mm as military vehicles rush up behind her; she is also our heir apparent, doomed to inherit decades of our culture war baggage and bullshit.

There are many other indelible performances, including Benicio del Toro as Willa’s mysterious martial arts teacher who offers further context and complexity to the act of resistance in 21st century America, and Regina Hall as another acquaintance from the past. They all inform a larger tapestry. With a genuinely stunning car chase in the film’s third act, and a deafening soundscape of gunfire and a Jonny Greenwood score that might leave you shell-shocked in IMAX, this is a strange thrilling beast of a movie. It has the scope and bombast of a blockbuster, but the soul of a dissident.

Through it all, One Battle After Another maintains Anderson’s bemused eccentricities, albeit with a newfound fire. Its flames come from a place of unusual warmth and familial bliss for the storyteller, building off the adolescent fuzzies he recently revisited in the elegiac Licorice Pizza; but the heat is also angry. The film is radicalized. And while the revolution may not be televised, you can now see it in 70mm IMAX.

One Battle After Another opens on Friday, Sept. 26.