Leonardo DiCaprio in 'One Battle After Another.' Courtesy of Warner Bros. Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment The director Paul Thomas Anderson has only made four films set in the present day. Save for that handful, and for a lovely detour to the United Kingdom, he has spent his career rooting around in the junk drawer of American history, exploring its madmen and prophets, its lost souls staggering through shellshocked post-war days. The end-of-the-world party of Boogie Nights gave way to the primal horror of There Will Be Blood, then to The Master's portrait of the mid-20th-century spiritual hunger, then to the wastoid hippie-burnout of Inherent Vice. After taking some time to attend to matters of the heart in 2017's Phantom Thread, Anderson chose to revisit the 1970s Los Angeles of Boogie Nights, only through Licorice Pizza's sentimental prism. He had, in some ways, closed the loop, freeing him to turn around and face the reality that was rushing at him, and at all of us. Related Stories General News Julia Roberts and Sean Penn Rally Behind Brazilian Oscar Hopeful 'Manas' Movies Ben Affleck, Matt Damon Find Hidden Money in Netflix's 'The Rip' Trailer One Battle After Another The Bottom Line A furious American epic, with style. Release date: Friday, Sep. 26Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, Regina HallDirector-screenwriter: Paul Thomas Anderson Rated R, 2 hours 42 minutes And thus One Battle After Another, a bracingly timely film loosely based on the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland. Both One Battle After Another and Vineland concern the ebb and flow of radicalism in America, bursts of activity followed by years of dangerous and disillusioning fallout. Anderson has contemporized the timeline, situating us in our dismayingly recognizable era of fascist creep and following a sadly less recognizable underground effort to stop it. It is a frightening and galvanizing vision, Anderson putting away his complicated nostalgia for old (and more easily understood) days to confront, with disarmingly noble purpose, the here and now. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, an explosives expert working with a faction of revolutionaries who bomb buildings, rob banks and stage rescue raids on deportation camps. Bob is the main squeeze of the group's fiery leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a passionate but reckless advocate for reproductive rights, open borders and Black liberation. Her ferocious ardor is so magnetic that even an avowed enemy like vicious jackboot Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) feels drawn to her. What ensues from that attraction sets One Battle After Another on its years-spanning odyssey of deliverance and reprisal. Anderson is not at all coy in his assertion that Lockjaw and the government he serves are largely motivated by seething racism, a brutish insistence on superiority meant to mask inadequacy and inevitably involving some kind of psychosexual conflict. Lockjaw's desire for Perfidia is one of both shame and dominance, a seamy wish to submit to her power as a way to prove its ultimate meaninglessness. He is a vile creation, almost cartoonish in his determined villainy, and he bears a chilling resemblance to real men operating in our world today. Whether or not Anderson plays fast and loose in his blunt depiction of racial politics will no doubt be a matter of some debate. But it is certainly a refreshing jolt to see a big picture like this analyze the squalid motivations of the people currently dispatching the National Guard to major cities and empowering ICE to spread far and wide in its cruel project. One Battle After Another is a furious film, a richly engaging and persuasive polemic from a filmmaker who has never shied from provocation but who has not before spoken so directly to his audience. Anderson seems incensed and horrified by the current American moment, frightened for his own mixed-race wife and children, and for all marginalized people being so stridently attacked and demeaned across the nation every day. But there is a weariness here, too, a resigned cynicism that carries the film into its second act, which zooms ahead some 15 years and finds Perfidia's child, Willa (Chase Infiniti), now a teenager living in hiding with her father, Bob. What is left of Bob's old revolutionary group, the French 75, has gone to ground, sending furtive signals out into the universe now and again but otherwise lying dormant. Well, Bob is dormant at least, losing himself to the deadening pleasures of booze and weed and barely maintaining watchful vigil over his daughter. He has not become complacent, exactly, but time away from the cause has softened his resolve. He's forgotten the old customs and codes, he has let the flame dwindle to almost nothing. Anderson does no