Go see it, folks. Even you, ChiBob--time to make an exception to the "man-cave mandate"!! :-)

American Hardcore
By J. Hoberman

Crashing into the zeitgeist against who-knows-what headwinds, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is just one dang thing after another, not to mention an impressive addition to the imposing edifice of the Anderson oeuvre. After an assertive if choppy start as a kick-ass, madcap, somewhat kinky, antifascist quasi–superhero flick—imagine Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) on big-budget steroids, served over ICE—it unfurls choreographed action sequences, initially organized by the militant immigrant-defense activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (multi-hyphenate Teyana Taylor). A failed bank job, complete with getaway car threading through gridlocked traffic, provides the prelude to the pregnant revolutionary’s bust and eventual disappearance.

Jumping ahead 16 years (from when to when is never explicitly stated), the movie settles briefly into cannabis-infused slapstick to find Perfidia’s ex, the washed-up militant Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), living below the radar in redwood-forest exile with the couple’s feisty adolescent daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Their quiet life (a rondo of sitcom banter, with a suitably absurd parent-teacher conference in which Bob checks the political correctness of the school’s lesson plans) is disrupted when an intervention by the family’s implacable nemesis, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), triggers the extended chase sequence that consumes the rest of the film. Bob is just firing up a doobie to dig The Battle of Algiers (1966) in brain-addled splendor when Lockjaw’s SWAT team descends from the heavens for another battle—busting up Willa’s queer-friendly high-school dance, terrorizing the town’s Latino workers, and creating mayhem that, escalating for nearly two hours, has Bob pursued throughout California, still in his flannel bathrobe.

Anderson is an admirer of Thomas Pynchon. Having successfully adapted the writer’s hippie noir Inherent Vice in 2014, he credits Pynchon’s Vineland (something like Inherent Vice’s anticipatory sequel) with inspiring One Battle. Published in 1990 and set at the height of the Reagan reaction in 1984, Vineland evokes the passing of the counterculture—with even greater richness, it mines the same territory as Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), as well as John Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979) and its wretched rip-off The Big Chill(1983).

Instead of adapting the novel, Anderson essentially borrows Vineland’s basic situation: a burned-out counterculture radical hides out in rural California with his teenage daughter. The girl’s mother, a revolutionary firebrand, has long since disappeared; father and daughter are threatened by the reappearance of a government agent with whom they tangled in the past. The attitude is Pynchonesque as well: like Anderson’s Inherent Vice, One Battle has a cartoony quality evident in the performances as well as the character names.

Pumped up and rigid, with facial contortions suggesting a hot poker up his butt, Penn’s Lockjaw is the actor’s most outlandish physical performance since he played high-school stoner Jeff Spicoli in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (to name-check another Reagan-era movie). As the proprietor of the local Ninja Academy, Benicio Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos coolly navigates the carnage, stealing every scene with pursed lips and a drolly arched eyebrow. (As a comic team, DiCaprio and Del Toro rival Del Toro and Johnny Depp in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) The fruit of revolutionary love, Sergio’s student Willa (sarcastically and erroneously identified by one of Lockjaw’s minions as “the only high-school girl in America that doesn’t have a phone”) is a fully convincing neophyte martial artist. (Infiti herself is a trained kickboxer.)

One Battle is not only tumultuous but funny. Anderson can’t resist satirizing woke jargon and underground protocols. Bob’s prolonged telephonic struggle with his underground contact “Comrade Josh” over his quasi-dormant revolutionary cell’s “greeting code” is the movie’s most sustained running gag. It’s also splendidly self-referential. Chased by highway patrol, Sergio needs to propel Bob out of a speeding car: “No fear, like Tom Fucking Cruise!” (Did DiCaprio do his own stunts? No matter.) Bob bails, hot-wires another automobile, and drives off over crazy highway hills in search of the abducted Willa. Ultimately, and quite movingly, One Battle is a story of father and daughter. Not for nothing does Tom Petty’s heartbreaking “American Girl” (along with Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) play over the end credits. Venceremos.

Speaking of love stories, I confess that I didn’t get Licorice Pizza (2021)—has there ever been a less appetizing title?—and am in no great rush to see it again. Still, that movie’s most impressive scene—Alana Haim piloting a monster moving truck—now seems like a dry run for One Battle’s orchestrated car chases. This is very much an action film. Anderson may not care much for genres, Inherent Vice being an exception, but he always seems to have formidable filmmakers and their films in mind. Thus, Boogie Nights matched itself against Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Magnolia seemingly addressed Altman’s Short Cuts. The go-for-baroque There Will Be Blood took on Welles and the studied perfection of The Master evoked Kubrick. If Phantom Thread could be seen as a rewriting of ’40s Hitchcock, One Battle After Another appears to engage something closer to home, namely Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. The title has a Tarantino-esque mano-a-mano ring even as it reinforces the movie’s split temporal structure—though, unlike in Once Upon a Time..., here both battles suggest the ’60s without actually being set in the ’60s.

One of the few working Hollywood directors who might qualify for a degree in American Studies, Anderson has made some impressively heady period films. Boogie Nights revived the hung-over ’70s; adapted from Upton Sinclair, There Will Be Blood pondered unfettered frontier capitalism and manifest destiny; The Master evoked the post–World War II “American Century.” One Battle, however, is aggressively present-tense—if anything, it seems to be set, like the adventures of A.I. TV host Max Headroom, 20 minutes into the future. I saw the movie only days after a youthful assassin elevated right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel martyrdom, and the same morning that the Trump regime, whose followers are parodied in the movie as the extralegal white-supremacist Christmas Adventurers Club, threatened a crackdown on an imagined network of left-wing terrorists. Variety reported the movie’s price tag at $175 million, and Warner Bros., which admits to $130 million, has got to be wondering if said crackdown will be good, bad, or very bad for business. I can’t speak to that, but I can testify that Anderson’s Battle is good for cinema. This rambunctious (hey guys, it’s only a) movie is not just energetic, but energizing.