‘One Battle After Another’ review: dude, where’s my revolution?

If The Dude – Jeff Bridges’ dressing-gown-wearing, weed-smoker from The Big Lebowski – was a former revolutionary, then you might have something akin to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another. The new film from Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) is a wild, propulsive and funny-as-hell tale of activists-in-hiding “inspired” by Vineland, the 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Anderson’s second adaptation of the mysterious American author, following 2014’s stoner detective yarn Inherent Vice, is a looser take, updated from the 1980s to contemporary times. But the Pynchon pot-addled paranoia remains, hanging over this trenchant look at a divided America. Along the way, we’ll meet marijuana-growing nuns, a cabal of ‘Christian Adventurers’ and, in his best role in years, Sean Penn as an unhinged militia head.

The story starts at the Otay Mesa Detention Centre in San Diego where radical vigilante group The French 75 are out to free detainees. Leading the charge is Ferguson and his lover Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), although musician Alana Haim – star of Anderson’s last film, Licorice Pizza – and rapper Shayna McHayle AKA Junglepussy are also in on the liberating action. “This is some Set It Off shit”, she yells during one raid, a nod to Queen Latifah’s 1996 bank robbery tale.

Before long, Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw has Perfidia arrested and strong-armed into ratting on the group. After going into witness protection, she disappears – leaving Bob and their young baby daughter behind. Fast-forward 16 years and Bob is hunkered down in the fictional town of Baktan Cross, addled by booze and drugs. His daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is now in her teens, tolerating her father’s fears – which become all too real when Lockjaw, determined to stop the spread of “uncontrolled migration”, picks up the trail to hunt Bob down.

DiCaprio’s Bob, AKA ‘Rocketman’, has to act – yanking himself from his couch where he quotes ‘60s war doc The Battle Of Algiers and gets baked. Scenes where he’s forced to recite code to access a rendezvous point but can’t because he’s forgotten vital passwords are hilarious, with Anderson constantly cranking up the hysteria. DiCaprio hasn’t been this battered in a movie (tasered, gassed, 40 foot falls) since 2015’s The Revenant and he embraces the chaos admirably.

With Benicio Del Toro popping up as Willa’s martial arts sensei – another vital cog in the community of undocumented immigrants persecuted by Lockjaw and his allies – and Regina Hall as one of the remaining French 75 members, it’s a delicious cast. And for the sixth time in a row, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is Anderson’s composer, offering an infectious blend of piano and percussive sounds that urge the characters on and set the rattling pace.

Operatic in its intensity and lush in its visuals (Anderson shot with old-school film format VistaVision), it’s a sometimes ragged, unwieldy experience. Like the recent Eddington, it’s another throw-it-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks movie. Some of it doesn’t. But thank the lord this $130m barmy blockbuster exists. From a pregnant Perfidia firing off rounds from her machine gun to an unforgettable finale on the undulating desert roads, it’s a mad stir of America’s melting pot on the cusp of boiling over.