One Battle After Another is profoundly hopeful. It’s not utopian. Spoiler alert, they don’t destroy capitalism or kill all of the white supremacists at the end of the film. But the film ends hopefully which is part of what makes the film unique in our current landscape. After watching it, I recalled a movie I had watched many years ago at the same theater. That movie was Queen and Slim, directed by Lena Waithe. Queen and Slim ends with the eponymous characters being betrayed and then murdered by the police after taking part in a cross country road trip. Queen and Slim is emblematic of a particular kind of perspective in Black stories that foregrounds death and despair rather than hope. While Paul Thomas Anderson is not Black which is perhaps why the film can be hopeful, One Battle After Another feels particularly indebted to the memory and history of the Black struggle in the United States that has often taken on a clandestine form, though the film is mostly vibes. The focus on Black struggle distinguished it from the source material. Vineland is a satirical novel by Thomas Pynchon that also follows the dissolution of a revolutionary group because of a snitch. While OBAA retains the satirical and absurd tone, the difference is that Vineland is largely about the hippie movement which had some radical elements (think the Weather Underground). The French 75 (named after the drink, one of many jokes in the film), the main revolutionary group in One Battle After Another, are a mostly Black and Mexican militant formation that liberates an ICE detention center near the border in the first scene of the film. I think the more appropriate analogue in this film would be the Black Liberation Army or even more appropriately the multi-racial Revolutionary Armed Task Force, which was an alliance between Black nationalists and white anti-imperialists. But all in all, I don’t think that PTA or any of his “radical” critics on Substack are thinking that hard about historical accuracy. They are all focused on vibes so I’ll focus on vibes, too.

Other reviewers have argued that this film couldn’t have been made in 2025 due to how studios seem to be scared of “woke” films and yet it’s precisely why the film feels timely. It’s extraordinary that he wrote the film’s script in 2021 or 2022 but it’s indicative of a quote from Anderson that I read in a recent interview. In an interview with Esquire, he says “For twenty years I’ve had all these various strands, and in a way, none of them ever went out of style, because whatever seems to be happening politically seems to always be the same.” Something I deeply appreciated about the film was the timelessness of it. The setting is clearly the United States but it’s not clear if it’s set in 2020 or 2040 or 1990. It doesn’t matter though. In the major time jump, a narrator in the film says something along the lines about how “nothing much had changed”. I think that the beauty of the film is the timeless quality. It exists in the space where people use iPhones and pay-phones. Oppression and injustice continue. There is not a moral arc towards justice like King said. If anything, the world has become worse since the capture of the revolutionary group The French 75. Captain Steve J. Lockjaw, the film’s antagonist, played by Sean Penn, becomes a colonel for his hunting of the revolutionaries for which he wins the “Bedford Forrest award”, another satirical reference to the founder of the Klu Klux Klan. The point is that white supremacy endures. This all feels especially relevant in the midst of Trump era 2.

But the revolutionaries also endure albeit as depressed stoners watching The Battle of Algiers on their couch. The plot picks up after many of the revolutionaries have been hunted down or flipped on by their comrades. That takes us to Bob, the main character played by DiCaprio, who is inactive politically. Despite this there are several different characters such as Howard Sommerville, Talleyrand, and Deandra (members of the French 75 established early in the film) who remain active fighters against the system. Sommerville operates a radio station where he protests the system and organizes in the community as he is depicted giving out business cards to people presumed to be undocumented. Although he is taken and divulges information about Bob, children from the neighborhood are able to warn the others that Howard has been captured. This prompts Deandra to go save Willa from an impending raid on her school dance. The emphasis on the school feels especially relevant when it’s been clear that ICE is targeting children at schools. The theme of the revolutionary youth having relationships with elder revolutionaries comes up over and over. For instance, Talleyrand, played by one of my favorite R&B singers Dijon, is shown once in a house with a bunch of other revolutionaries including a younger phone operator that Bob is annoyed with. So while his beard is graying, Talleyrand, like Sommerville, continues the fight. I just wish we had gotten an original Dijon track from the movie.

The most devastating scenes in the film are when it comes to the parts where the French 75 are hunted down or captured. Much of the action is contained in the state authorities coming after the revolutionaries. There’s a scene particularly where they capture Teyana Taylor’s character Perfidia Beverly-Hills where the cops are all taking selfies after capturing her. That particular image really stuck in my brain especially thinking about Assata Shakur who has passed on. It only makes sense that cops would take selfies with a captured Black revolutionary. In Philadelphia, the police were known to strip Black Panthers to embarrass them publicly so that scene felt right in line with the history and present reality. Another example of parading the accused revolutionary could be the moment where Eric Adams and the FBI perp-walked Luigi Mangione from the helicopter into custody. Nothing in this movie is far flung from our own reality as PTA says “whatever seems to be happening politically seems to always be the same.”

And the enemies in the film remain the same. White supremacists are the clear enemies in the film while they vary in their levels of depravity and wealth. They are sinister and cruel. The scariest part of the film for me was when Willa is dropped off by an indigenous bounty hunter at a white supremacist compound where it’s implied that they are killing people of color and dropping them in the lake. This scene reminded me of how there’s been reports of non-government militias dressed like ICE and taking people. The other reference was in the film Civil War in which Jesse Plemmons plays as white supremacist who is clearly committing atrocities in the name of white supremacy while wearing a uniform. On the other end, the Christmas Adventurers Club is a clear commitment to the white supremacy that reaches far higher than some militia out in the middle of the desert but instead, they are in the halls of power.

The most refreshing and surprising part is that the revolutionaries in this film are by and large sincere in their desires and struggles against oppression. The other film that I thought of in relation to this one was Eddington, directed by Ari Aster which I hated. I hated Eddington because it portrayed “antifa” and people who care about racial oppression as insincere, naive and stupid. Meanwhile One Battle After Another features white revolutionaries like Bob who hate the slave-owning racist origins of the United States while Eddington mocks that same type of person. In fact, Bob could be understood by many characters in the film as a race-traitor with the nickname “ghetto-pat” or being called a “bad hombre” by Sergio. I also would argue in contrast to others who believe the story to be “a white man’s story” that Bob is actually the most useless character in the film who is aided throughout by Black and Latino revolutionaries. He doesn’t even really save his daughter in the end despite his revolutionary ideals. I loved that the film depicts committed radical youth like Willa who proudly hate snitches even if that snitch is her mom. Instead of how films like Eddington sneer at sincere youthful commitment to political values as brainwashing by social media or some such, this movie makes it clear. Racism and white supremacy are fucking wrong. Film-bros be damned. Furthermore, community organizing and collective resistance is the key. Also, what was the last major Hollywood movie that portrayed a Black woman killing a white supremacist as a good thing?

The prime example of this is Benicio Del Toro’s character Sensei Sergio St. Carlos. Sensei Sergio is clearly a community organizer who is involved in an underground railroad and support network for undocumented people in the fictional Baktan Cross, which is described as a sanctuary city. Sensei Sergio helps Bob evade the police multiple times in the film (with help from many people in the community such as the skaters or the nurse). In addition to helping Bob, he’s engaged in acts of community defense by sheltering people from the immigration authorities, not to mention he teaches Willa how to fight. Importantly, the Sensei is not a member of the French 75. He’s just another member of a community that’s actively organized to resist oppression albeit perhaps non-violently. We get one other example of this with the revolutionary nuns who grow weed, shoot guns, harbor fugitives and train martial arts. The only thing I really didn’t like about this movie when it came to resistance is that it feeds a bit into the “outside agitator” narrative when Lockjaw calls in “Eddie Van Halen” to throw a molotov to start a riot. But that’s beside the point as the rest of the film endorses direct action as a way to fight back. Sensei is one of my favorite characters as he is different from Bob’s anxious paranoid state as he possesses a zen that allows him to carefully take a variety of steps to fight back against Lockjaw’s raid. I wish we got to find out what happens to him as he leaves the film facing police custody. Through Sergio and other characters, the film conveys that the revolution was not finished when the French 75 was crushed. It has only evolved. Even the young skaters who work alongside Sensei are indicative of this, the youth will and must continue the fight.

This leads to my favorite scene at the end of the film. It’s brief. Bob is trying out his new iPhone as Willa receives a communication about a protest in Oakland. As she is leaving, Bob tells her to be careful. She says that she won’t and he seems content with that response. The beauty in this is that the revolution continues. The film doesn’t end on a utopic note. The Christmas Adventurers Club are still out there plotting on white supremacist world domination. Some of the characters such as Deandra (woefully underutilized played by Regina Hall) and Howard are captured by the State. And yet, the struggle continues. That’s the beauty of the film. Our film era and broader cultural moment is composed largely of nihilistic screeds like Eddington that tells us that “everything and everyone is bad and horrible”. This is boring and uninteresting politically to me. In many ways, Eddington does try to grapple with many of the same things as One Battle After Another. Except the conclusion of that film is an “enlightened centrist” take which relegates hatred of white supremacy as the domain of woke white liberals rather than a centuries long ethical commitment of Black liberation. By contrast, Paul Thomas Anderson has a some understanding of this history as one character describes that Perfidia and thus Willa comes from a “long line of revolutionaries”.

One Battle After Another is a warm alternative to the monoculture that embraces love, community and resistance. The Right wing feels ascendant in our political moment and amongst the Left culturally, there is often overreliance on cynicism and doomerism. Obviously, there will be leftist cynics in regard to this film but it’s easy to ignore them. There will be critiques of the film as inauthentic or big Hollywood co-opting radical struggle. And that’s all true, however, I don’t believe in cinema being “revolutionary” as a form, as I am doubtful this film will inspire people to be involved in direct action or communities of resistance as those things as the film depicts tend to be largely unpopular. We are all just consuming it the same way that Bob consumes The Battle of Algiers early on in the film or how socialist critics of this film consume Zohran TikToks. But I do think One Battle After Another has a strong message of hope in the face of overwhelming odds which feels especially good for me, right now.

The film itself is far from perfect, there’s a lot to be said about how Paul Thomas Anderson writes about women (his depiction of Perfidia Beverly-Hills is complicated at best, badly written at worst). However, I will say that fetishistic interracial relationships in left-wing communities are quite common. For better or worse, maybe I had less discomfort during those scenes in the film because it reminded me of the commonality of relationships in real life (especially on the Left) that are animated by disturbing racial desires. A friend of mine mentioned how the film’s racial politics reminded her of Elaine Brown’s relationship to white FBI informant Jay Kennedy in her autobiography A Taste of Power. This attraction feels partially connected to the inconclusive accusations against Brown as an informant by people like Kathleen Cleaver or Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt. Perhaps Elaine is a better real life analogue to Perfidia than Assata. But I doubt PTA was thinking that hard about the history of the Black Panther Party. He probably just has a fetish like his characters. Who knows? Still though, the racial discomfort around the first twenty minutes is real but I am unsure if the answer to it is as clear as some critics are making out to be. I guess I’ll have to do a rewatch.

But all in all, the title completely captures the main idea of the film which is that the struggle must continue, one battle after another. Tenacity, bravery and willingness to keep going just like Bob did as he tried to find Willa is the key to the heart that makes this movie pulse. I don’t know if a major Hollywood studio will ever make a movie like this again but I’m glad I got to see it.