The Brooklyn Rail

After two viewings of One Battle After Another (2025), a rather fleeting moment at the top of the film’s second act resonates with me quite emotionally. For a film rife with so many bizarre and absurd and chaotic and terrifying and funny moments, a brief scene between a father and a school teacher, for me, quickly encapsulates the aching beauty at the core of a film receiving massive critical acclaim and attention as a piece of filmmaking characterized as, apparently, revolutionary. After a sixteen year time jump from act one, we meet Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson in his car, taking a few hits from his hand pipe before a parent-teacher conference. In the school, the frame stays on Bob in a high-angle close-up while he admires the history class decorum, making light of the “history” taught about past US presidents and taking a hit off his vape before blurting about the presence of founding fathers: “fucking slave owners everywhere.” The hippie ex-revolutionary single dad’s politics are practically sewn into his weed-smell soaked clothing. After he extinguishes his thoughts, the teacher shares some remarks about his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), mentioning how well she is doing in school and as a leader in class. Bob breaks—he cries, briefly, conveying to the teacher that Willa didn’t know her mom and that she died when Willa was very young. The scene plays for a laugh, as Bob’s cry upon hearing about his daughter’s success comes across quite befuddling. But the moment is also devastatingly moving and, for me, the heart of the picture.

Bob, an alias used by the former radical revolutionary once known as “Ghetto Pat” or “Rocketman,” is living a life in hiding for his contribution to the revolutionary efforts of the French 75, a revolutionary group launching operations against an authoritarian, fascist regime—upending immigration detention centers to free detainees and blowing up banks, political offices, and power grids to disrupt the status quo. Bob’s feelings, the sudden tears of joy and sorrow upon hearing Willa’s praise, are an amalgam of all that has come before—the French 75, his relationship with Willa’s mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Perfidia’s subsequent disappearance, the sixteen years spent hiding in Baktan Cross—and what is to come in the future. The revolution is right here—not that Willa is a great student, necessarily, but that she is part of this world, doing the work, persisting. While much of the commentary (justifiably) stirred by this picture juxtaposes the political schema at work within the film with our current political crises—with atrocities being doled out by our increasingly fascist, authoritarian regime—the revolutionary work that the film actually commits to is at the level of community and family and being willing to do the work day after day, one battle after another.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is an exceptional feat of propulsive filmmaking and storytelling. It is a daring, timely, magnificent, hilarious, and prescient tale spun out of the pages of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) that deliberately plays (at least through its first act) with the idea of a United States under an authoritarian regime and a band of ragtag revolutionaries attempting to disrupt it, though never dismantling it. Clocking in at just under three hours yet playing out like a breezy ninety minutes, the main narrative takes off when Bob and Willa are forced to flee from Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (played by a gritty and menacing Sean Penn), an adversary from Bob’s past with the French 75. Lockjaw descends upon Baktan Cross under the guise of an ICE operation in a sanctuary town. Lockjaw’s actual agenda concerns Bob and, more specifically, Willa. Approached by white supremacist nationalist syndicate the Christmas Adventures Club (who greet each other with “Merry Christmas” and “Hail Saint Nick”) about joining their ranks, Lockjaw must dispense with any and all evidence of his relationship to Perfidia Beverly Hills, a Black woman with whom he had an affair, and Willa, who may potentially be his biracial child.

There is an ambivalence to PTA’s depiction of—and Teyana Taylor’s commanding performance as—Perfidia. She is treated as a highly sexualized and racialized object of desire for Bob and Lockjaw (in ways that are somewhat more common than differentiated) and the audience’s resolve about her character is left in limbo. After having her baby, Perfidia resents (and questions her resentment over) the attention Bob gives to the newborn instead of to her. Perfidia seemingly chooses the revolution over her baby, which varying audiences will register differently. And the fact that she is Black and a woman and finds herself at the whims of a white male at a pivotal moment that will determine her future is important to understanding why she ends up where she does in the final moment that we see her. Though she disappears from the narrative after the first act, her presence lingers over the rest of the film, which is a testament to the character and Taylor’s performance. There is more to say beyond this review about the race and gender dynamics at work in the film, and Perfidia has to be the center of those conversations.

Through the use of a trust device devised by the French 75, Willa manages an escape with former French 75er Deandra (a quiet yet wholly affecting Regina Hall) to a convent of nuns. Bob, meanwhile, high at home, receives a coded call about the coming storm. Unable to remember a password to obtain a rendezvous point to be with Willa, Bob is thrust into a journey—set to Jonny Greenwood’s clanking and clickity melodramatic score—to break through the bureaucratic red tape of revolutionary codespeak and reunite with his daughter. Along Bob’s journey, he seeks the help of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro, as cool as ever), Willa’s martial arts instructor who is also dealing with the evening’s calamity and its impact on his “Latino Harriet Tubman situation,” wherein he offers passage and refuge to Latin American immigrants free of charge, from the heart. A unique contrast arises as Bob fumbles over revolutionary guidelines while Sergio coolly deals with the constriction of military personnel upon his labyrinthine apartment building/sanctuary. These are two types of revolutionaries amid different types of revolutionary efforts. They perhaps have similar principles, but the varying tactics and agendas are incredible to witness during such a chaotic and absurd moment for the both of them. Neither is better or more apt for the time than the other, necessarily. The two strands are striving towards similar goals and against familiar adversaries.

The fiction of the film’s diegetic US politics—which do not appear bound by our own reality (unless… did Obama’s first term usher in the rise of radical revolutionaries?)—eerily echoes the nonfiction of our incrementally troublesome political predicament. Yet, One Battle is not revolutionary in the way many might be quick to conclude. For some of its runtime, it is concerned with revolution. It leans hard into revolutionary aesthetics cemented in the popular imagination by radical militant groups in the late sixties and early seventies, á la the Black Panthers. Before I get too carried away, PTA deploys a revolutionary spirit throughout the film—its sight set against authoritarianism and the pervasiveness of white supremacy—but the utility of this spirit is but a backdrop to a narrative whose revolution concerns a family (a story about a father and daughter) rather than necessarily championing a sweeping political statement rooted in class, race, sex, or gender. The film does surely arrive at an unflinching time, as the violence on immigrants and people of color by masked ICE agents proliferates. But the film wasn’t made in 2025 (it was filmed in early- to mid-2024), and, as others have noted, might not have been made today. Nevertheless, the film exists today, and the politics that we graft onto the dynamics at work within the film are certainly important and impossible to ignore. And yet, the film is not a catalyst for revolutionary action, nor a piece of revolutionary cinema.

When I think about revolutionary cinema, I think about Third Cinema—I think about the impact of neocolonialism and the work of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, their manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” and their film The Hour of the Furnaces (1968). My mind goes to the challenges to production, distribution, and exhibition that Third Cinema and this film pioneered—showings of The Hour of the Furnaces took place in non-traditional exhibition settings, segments were rearranged and projected out of order, and screenings included deliberate disruptions for moments of discourse among viewers. Another film heralded under the banner of Third Cinema is one playing on the TV right before Colonel Lockjaw descends upon Bob’s home in Baktan Cross: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), an anti-colonial film that utilizes documentary aesthetics to tell a story of radicalization in the face of the French occupation of Algiers. I mention all this to say that One Battle After Another’s narrative and distribution is actually quite conventional and not really within the purview of what might be thought of as revolutionary cinema. I mean, it is unconventional to see a filmmaker likely defined as an arthouse auteur like PTA obtain the large budget and studio backing he did for this absurdist, Pynchon-inspired tale. Yet, Warner Bros. Pictures footed the bill, and the film has produced PTA’s biggest yield at the box office. A surprise for sure, but not a revolutionary one. Some exhibitions of the film were also a little unconventional, a little left-field of the infrastructural convention for theatrical pictures today, but largely because of the growing novelty of the film projection format and this film being photographed in VistaVision (a process of 35 mm filmstock processed horizontally at 8 perforation-per-frame rather than vertically at 4 perfs, resulting in a larger, native widescreen, high-fidelity image).

Without diving too much into the film’s third act, PTA turns stretches of California desert hills and roads into daunting, treacherous passages where each bend and mound bring new risks and unknown narrative turns. It’s quite remarkable how much of One Battle After Another’s third act continually pushed me into a state of not knowing what would happen next. While we might feel that a denouement is on the horizon and thus the pieces presented to us must somehow resolve, PTA is the kind of filmmaker that may or may not lead us where we want, but where the narrative necessitates. PTA skillfully manipulates us with the geography, and craftily stages one of the most effective and unexpecting car chases I’ve ever witnessed, utilizing hilly terrain, long lens, focus pulling, blocking, and character and performance in a well-orchestrated and fascinatingly elaborate sequence. It’s a car chase shot unlike any other, evoking a sense of suspense driven by the camera so effortlessly shepherded by Alfred Hitchcock.

The final act of the film is also indebted to Infiniti’s performance as Willa. She learns that her mother, whom Bob had told her was a revolutionary hero, was in fact a rat to the revolution. She is then forced to reckon with her possibly biological father who may be attempting to end her life quite imminently. Willa is radicalized by her need to survive and be(come) herself. Whether or not she is Lockjaw’s biological child, she is Bob’s daughter, and Bob is her dad. Though the mother she doesn’t remember may have been a rat, she is not to be reduced to that. Instead, the third act emphasizes how Willa—Bob’s daughter, the good student and emerging leader—fights the battles doled out to her, making quick decisions to save her life and pave her own road. Willa is a teenager fighting her own revolutions, which include (but are not limited to) thwarting the overbearing clutches of her paranoid hippie dad and escaping the gratuitous violence of white supremacy. In the final moment of the film, Bob and Willa are reunited in their home and appear to have a more loving disposition towards one another. Bob then shares a letter for Willa from Perfidia that he had held for some time. Willa reads the letter by herself as we hear Perfidia’s voiceover. The letter—expressing love, time lost, regret—mentions the failures of Perfidia and Bob’s revolution. But in that failure, Perfidia imparts a kindling of hope for Willa and the revolution: that maybe she and her generation will be the ones that succeed. An emotional conclusion ramped up by the use of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” as Willa leaves the house to join a protest hours away, the film concludes with the notion that the revolution is carrying on the good fight. Bob crying at hearing that Willa is a leader and doing well in school was him seeing her carrying on, persisting. As a dad myself, I can only hope my child will do the same. As she leaves the house, Bob tells Willa, “Be good!” Willa responds, “I won’t.” The revolution is being in it, not just going through it, but getting through it, and stepping up to do it again. It might be scary, but you have to go. As Sergio said: “No fear, like Tom fucking Cruise.” It’s all one battle after another.