‘One Battle After Another,’ Paul Thomas Anderson and Cinema’s Political Playbook

With One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson rewrites the playbook for political cinema

By Christian Lorentzen
Artwork by Matt McCormick

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It’s fortuitous when the zeitgeist and a filmmaker’s long-gestating vision intersect, and in 2025 that was the case with Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The last decade and a half has seen no shortage of political protest and violence, but few commercial American films strayed into radical zones to reflect the times. The bankable auteurs of Anderson’s generation turned in historical war dramas (Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Oppenheimer), counterfactual nostalgic revenge fantasies (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood), reckonings with the American security state (Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit) or slick crime thrillers (David Fincher’s Zodiac and The Killer). Anderson’s last two pictures were backward-looking romances perched somewhere between the poles of the wistful (Licorice Pizza) and the perverse (Phantom Thread). Yet there were indications he was capable of meeting the moment: a few of his previous works had engaged with the brutality of capitalism (There Will Be Blood), cults of personality (The Master) and the threeway clash among the counterculture, the fuzz and big business (Inherent Vice). The last two of those films drew on novels by Thomas Pynchon, America’s postwar laureate of political paranoia. The rumors that Anderson was working on a movie inspired by Vineland, a story of once radical hippies on the run from the Feds in the 1980s, suggested intriguing possibilities, but not until One Battle After Another arrived was it clear that he’d dispensed with the amber of a story set decades in the past. 

Suddenly we have a tale of American revolutionaries in our time, tricked out with iconic movie stars, chase scenes across idyllic landscapes, classic-rock needle drops, a heartwarming family story and a humorous cocktail of pratfalls and forgotten code words. Drawing on a tradition of international art-house films, American outsider cinema and prestige Hollywood biopics, One Battle After Another calls to mind films as disparate as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty and Warren Beatty’s Reds. Produced by Warner Bros. with a budget north of $100 million, Anderson’s film pulls off perhaps the ultimate gesture of resistance by smuggling political subversion back into the mainstream. 

Anderson has said he’d started writing One Battle before the birth of one of its stars, 25-year-old Chase Infiniti, who plays the teenager Willa Ferguson. That it landed in theaters during a second Trump administration, when agents of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement were on the streets in masks apprehending people (with worse to come) was a sign either of auteurist foresight or a society that has been in need of radical reforms, if not overthrow, for a long time. Though the federal enforcers, led by Sean Penn’s Captain Steven Lockjaw, have real-life analogues in ICE, it isn’t so with the French 75, the armed insurrectionist group led by Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ghetto Pat (aka Bob Ferguson), throwbacks to the radicals of the 1960s and ’70s without contemporary equivalents. But the film takes its structure from a long line of thrillers about rebels, resistance fighters and revolutionaries: first a flurry of spectacular actions, then a long hangover of repression. 

Few filmmakers have attempted to depict a revolution on american soil other than the one led by George Washington.”

One Battle After Another begins with the French 75 liberating a migrant detention camp, planting bombs at a courthouse, and robbing a bank. When the last action goes awry and Perfidia is busted, Pat, their infant daughter and the rest of the crew go into hiding. Fifteen years later, Pat and the child are living in the woods in Northern California under assumed names when Lockjaw and his military-grade forces come after them. We see Pat, burnt out from years of drinking and smoking weed, light up a joint while watching The Battle of Algiers in his living room. The 1966 film portrays the uprising of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) between 1954 and 1957 and its brutal repression by the French Army; in it, the French capture or kill the FLN militants to a man, but something like a happy ending is gained by a coda depicting the popular strikes that began in 1960 and led to Algerian independence in 1962. Anderson pays tribute to Pontecorvo by putting his film on the small screen in the den, but there are other cinematic references that adhere to the same structure: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, about members of the French Resistance in Paris whose efforts against the Nazi occupation devolve into defensive actions; and Claude Chabrol’s Nada, about a cell of militants who kidnap an American diplomat from a Paris brothel. With a softer touch, Anderson mostly spares his characters the tragic endings that await the heroes of those films. 

It’s no coincidence that few filmmakers have attempted to depict a revolution on American soil other than the one led by George Washington. (The ungainly 1985 Al Pacino vehicle Revolution suggests that it’s hard to do that one well.) The best attempt I’ve seen at imagining a modern American revolution is The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a 1973 blaxploitation classic directed by Ivan Dixon, a civil rights activist and one of the stars of Hogan’s Heroes. Lawrence Cook plays Dan Freeman, a Black nationalist recruited by the CIA as a diversity hire. After undergoing tactical training in guerilla warfare he resigns and heads to Chicago to recruit cadres and start an uprising, following the agency’s playbook of subversion. The film ends with the National Guard moving in to put down the insurrection just as it’s spreading to cities across the country. Distributed by United Artists, the movie was an instant hit but was quickly pulled from theaters; Sam Greenlee, author of the novel it was adapted from, believed the ban was the FBI’s doing. 

Anderson has signaled his debts to other figures of cinematic rebellion. In Boogie Nights, he honored his countercultural muse Robert Downey Sr. three ways: first by casting him, then by naming a character in honor of Putney Swope and finally by repurposing (with permission) the firecracker scene from that film. Downey Sr. made his politically subversive classic outside the studio system, but its story of a Black takeover of a Madison Avenue advertising firm (“Rocking the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat!”) is a spiritual antecedent for One Battle After Another. 

More recently, Anderson programmed a screening as part of the festivities for his pal Este Haim’s wedding. First on the list: Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984). Hot off of the iconoclastic cult classic and Sid and Nancy (1986), Cox was once another ambitious auteur collaborating with a countercultural writer on a radical project for a Hollywood studio. His 1987 movie Walker, written by Pynchon contemporary Rudy Wurlitzer, was Cox’s greatest punk provocation. Shot in Nicaragua during the Reagan era with the support of the administration’s Contra War adversaries (in the form of INCINE, the Sandinista-backed national film foundation founded after the 1979 revolution), the film stars Ed Harris as the real-life colonialist who installed himself as president of Nicaragua in 1856. Its incendiary commentary on U.S. intervention in Central America breaks through in the film’s anachronistic ending, when an American military helicopter descends to remove U.S. citizens to safety. Released by Universal, Walker bombed at the box office, relegating the filmmaker to his own professional exile: He never worked in the studio system again. Cox’s fate puts into context Anderson’s risk when it comes to directly engaging with radical politics within the Hollywood machine.

Conventional moralizing that affirms bourgeois sensibilities has generally fared better in Hollywood, where defeated and fugitive radicals have long been fair game. Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst (1988) features star turns by Ving Rhames as General Field Marshal Cinque and Natasha Richardson as the heiress he and his comrades kidnap and convert into a militant named Tania. We know how that story ends: The radicals end up dead or in prison, and the brainwashed rich girl gets a pardon and a book deal. Sidney Lumet’s 1988 domestic melodrama Running on Empty asks what becomes of wanted American radicals when they try to lead normal lives under assumed names. The answer is that their politics will in the long term require major emotional sacrifices. Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti play Arthur and Annie Pope, mild-mannered suburban parents who just happened to take part in the bombing of a napalm laboratory more than a decade earlier. They have to split town when they learn the FBI is catching up with them. What to do about their son Danny, an innocent teenager played by River Phoenix, whose virtuosity at the piano has gained him admission to Julliard? 

A dynamic of radicalism redeemed by glamour animates the grandest Hollywood epic of revolution, Warren Beatty’s Reds (1980). As the journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, Beatty and Diane Keaton (along with co-star Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill) lent their beautiful faces to the cause of Communism in what turned out to be the late stage of the Cold War and after decades of Tinsel Town reprisals against industry pinkos. Unlike the many films made about fugitive activists, Reds’ revolution takes hold and makes demands on its heroes, pulls them apart, sets them on long journeys by boat, train, and across snow and ice. Like Anderson, Beatty used the most effective artillery for a film with apparently radical political content to win over audiences: star power. Twelve years after Reds, Spike Lee followed the same imperative casting Denzel Washington in Malcolm X (1992). (Though it’s hard now to imagine The Battle of Algiers without its Algerian non-professional actors, Gillo Pontecorvo had initially dreamed of Paul Newman starring in his vérité masterpiece.) That both Reds and Malcolm X—films that were feted by the Academy—end with the death of their American-born revolutionaries reminds us of the real-life stakes and sacrifice of political commitment. 

Anderson’s great magic act is to mine all of these sources but resist the tragic logic of their implications. He lets the contradictions in his film—the militant and the sentimental, the realist and the absurd, the grime and the glitz—linger. In the end, his revolutionaries are not vanquished but neither are they in danger of taking power (or being corrupted by it). A real battle, like Pontecorvo’s, ends either in victory or defeat. In the ahistorical fantasy Anderson has imagined, teenage Willa can go on fighting, and the battles will continue, one after another, for generations.

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