Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, “One Battle After Another,” erupts into existence not as subtle social commentary but as political artillery. Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio force viewers to stare the violence and injustice of this world in the face. The film peers at systems of power, racial violence, sexual coercion, and state surveillance and gives no quarter. In a moment where “neutrality” has become code for complicity, this film refuses to remain silent and soft. It is art as resistance.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays the main character, Bob Ferguson, a washed-up former revolutionary of the group French 75, who has fallen into addiction and paranoia while raising his daughter Willa (Infiniti Chase) as a single father following the disappearance of his former partner and co-revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).
DiCaprio has called the film a timely “satire” addressing polarization and extremism, seen clearly in the way in which white supremacy and fascism are portrayed in the film. Anderson has been “pulling on…threads…for 20 years” in the act of crafting this film, a project that has followed him through most of his major works as a director.
“One Battle After Another” is an urgent piece of art. It reveals the rot that society performatively ignores, the gendered and racial violence that is accepted, and the wounds refused to stitch. In this current political moment, when art that unsettles is under assault, this film, and others like it, are important because they meet that assault with their own—an assault back on the comfortable ignorance that society has fallen into.
The Film as a Mirror
The opening montage blasts onto the screen with a raid on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, late-night bombings of government buildings, presentations of racial and sexual violence, and declarations of war in pursuit of an America with “Free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from f- – – – -’ fear!” as proclaimed by Perfidia. From the start, the film insists on confrontation rather than comfort.
Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw’s (Sean Penn) control and obsession over Perfidia is grotesque, fetishistic, violent, and all too reminiscent of real abuses of power. What the film allows us to feel is how often those in authority view bodies as territory rather than humans, trophies with no feelings.
When Perfidia becomes pregnant, the question of paternity (Bob or Lockjaw) is symbolic: whose blood, whose trauma, whose claim on the future? When Bob acts as her father, believing simply in his undying love for Perfidia and wishing to carry on her will, he does so with defiance. His love is imperfect, marred by his addiction and paranoia, but it is necessary.
With Lockjaw returning to hunt down Bob and Willa 16 years later, not just to finish off the French 75 as he claims, but to wipe any possible trace of his links to Perfidia, a Black woman, in his pursuit to join the white supremacist organization, the “Christmas Adventurers Club,” this lifelong paranoia of Bob’s finally becomes understandable to Willa.
When Willa herself becomes the victim, eventually kidnapped and forced to face the truth about her heritage, she still proclaims Bob, their relationship one of messy understanding, to be her father, and she fights the violence she faces with a keen instinct to survive. She is scared, thrown into a world of horrors, and compelled to confront the truth of her existence, but she is allowed the agency as a character to push beyond it all, showing how resistance requires both courage and fear.
Bob’s decline from the beginning serves as a metaphor for political burnout, illustrating how movements are forced underground, ideals are compromised, and trauma does not disappear even when battles end or fade. The absurdity with which most of these serious events are portrayed, especially in the cartoonishly evil characters like Lockjaw, forces viewers to look around at the world and realize that this absurdity is not too far off from the one we live in.
Resonance with Our Political Moment
This film lands in theaters when the far right is normalizing surveillance, attacking reproductive rights in court, reintroducing book bans, introducing anti-DEI laws, and radically suppressing speech while gubernatorial overreach has become an everyday strategy to further their goals. The film makes a danger that many wish was distant feel as present as it truly is.
DiCaprio said “One Battle After Another” is relevant to “the world we’re living in right now.” That kind of intentionality matters: Anderson chose specifically for this not to be a palatable film. He wrote it among a backdrop of growing political rage and the suppression of radical dissent. Our country tries to chase “unity” by erasing difference, but this movie amplifies what “unity” tries to suppress: anger, grief, and agency.
The film is so powerful for that reason. It rejects the comforting myth that art must soothe, demanding that it instead provokes. When the wrongdoings of the antagonists eventually catch up to them, it comes with a sense of poetic justice, yes, but it is also a warning. The system may morph, but its cruelty often finds a way to self-replicate and reemerge in new forms.
Radical Art & “Vineland’”s Ghosts
Anderson explicitly acknowledges that Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland” was the root of his inspiration for this film. However, noting that a direct adaptation of the novel would have been too difficult, he explains that he “stole the parts that really resonated” and filled in the gaps himself.
“Vineland” is haunted by how revolutions fade, how revolutionaries age, and how memory becomes a commodity. “One Battle After Another” lives in that space: reclaiming memory as a tool beyond nostalgia. The past has gone by, but its effects always remain in the present.
In “Vineland,” characters are haunted by cultural amnesia — TV, drugs, and the Newtonian decay of dissent. In this film, Bob carries that haul: addiction, retreat, and hidden domestic struggle. Perfidia’s notoriety and Willa’s defiance are echoes of Pynchon’s insistence that the revolution is not over even if its monuments rot. Radical art must be made to be remembered.
Why a Clear, Unapologetic Stance Matters
Some will say “One Battle After Another” is too much, overly violent, tone-deaf, or too woke. Fox News’ David Marcus proclaimed the film “ill-timed” and “hard to watch.” Critics like him reveal what is truly at stake: they prefer art that flatters power, art that comforts, that conforms. Denouncing extremism by pretending it is imaginary is cowardice. Pretending brutal control over people’s bodies, over their speech, and over their identity is not happening just because it might not personally affect one is a weakness.
Other criticisms, not as political, might point out the supposed messiness of the plot structure, the characters’ relationships, and how unsatisfying the experience might have been to them. But this disorderliness is a necessary part of what makes this film what it is. In order to capture the turmoil of our own world, Anderson could not make this story, the world in this film, a satisfying one.
When Teyana Taylor spoke of how she drew from her experience of motherhood and postpartum depression, she empowered this trauma. Her contribution — making Perfidia emotionally real — pulls this radical story out of abstraction and gives it flesh, gives it teeth, gives it its humanity. When DiCaprio and PTA say that this story was necessary at the moment we are living in now, they are asserting that art cannot wait for the perfect moment. The moment is always the moment, the clash is always immediate.
Radical Art as a Practice of Freedom
“One Battle After Another” demands that viewers stop looking away. It insists that watching is not a passive act and insists that discomfort is not a bug: it is the only way forward in a time when comfort is deployed to stabilize justice.
Radical art is a mandatory weapon. When states criminalize protest, when power claims objectivity, and when the media insists on safe distance, art must shatter scenes, tear open silences, and unmask obscene truths. This film, rather than resolution or peace, offers vigilance, memory, and responsibility.
Audiences will leave theaters entertained but uneasy. That is exactly the point. The film’s anger, its wild tonal shifts from hilarious to heart-wrenching, and its uncompromised characters are fidelity to truth, not excess. In a political age that demands moral courage and clarity, where many choose to whisper, “One Battle After Another” roars and dares us to roar back.