One Battle After Another: There’s so much to relish in Paul Thomas Anderson’s political cat-and-mice caper

The title of Paul Thomas Anderson’s giddying, farcical political action thriller is a promise and a world view: in One Battle After Another, the arc of history bends so far round it can spit in its own guilty face. Filleted and reworked from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which reactivated long-dropped-out, off-grid 1960s radicals in the era of Reaganite reaction, Anderson’s film yanks the tale forward to the 21st century.

An extended prologue introduces a cell of guerrilla liberationists – at their heart, a lusty interracial couple, Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, on a spree of migrant detention centre breakouts, bank raids and embassy assaults. (They’re more Bonnie and Clyde or Baader-Meinhof than any of the anti-corporate or Islamist movements you may associate with the post-9/11 years, but Anderson is moving at a fantastical lick, far from the scrupulous date lining of period films such as There Will Be Blood, 2007, and The Master, 2012). Two intruders spoil the party: Sean Penn’s implacable racist Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, who leads a counter-revolutionary rout of the gang while nursing a desire for Perfidia; and a baby, which Bob is left squarely holding while Perfidia gives everyone the slip.

Cut to the present: Bob, long hidden in the northern California redwoods, tries to adhere to a regime of analogue untraceability and escapability through a haze of dope and beer while snarking at the newfangled friends of his now teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). True to classic myth, out of the past comes Lockjaw to clear away loose ends: the old leftists are not the only party with underground proclivities, and aspiring fascist Lockjaw has a point to prove to club-class racial purists who are dangling an invitation to join a sleek secret society, the Christmas Adventurers. What follows is two screen hours of pell-mell, crazy-quilt cat-and-mice caper, chasing south through California to the Mexican border as Bob and Willa separately hotfoot it, aided by a network of allies running sanctuary spaces, from a school dance hall to an undocumented immigrant safe house and a convent in the desert, while Lockjaw and his lieutenants interrogate and raid their way in pursuit.

Through attunement or divination, One Battle After Another lands in a dystopian 2025 when the levers of power are being stress-tested by grotesques from the far side of the American gothic nightmare: racists arising, fascists empowered to leave the closet. The images of quasi-militarist street shakedowns and urban takeovers cut close to the bone in a time of ICE raids and National Guard incursions.

There’s urgent horror here, but hot-button politics are not the film’s main game. Anderson channels the films he loves that have passed this way before while carrying their legacy forward. It’s a film about generational reprises and hand-offs, the battles fought and to be fought again. His task, as for the frazzled dad DiCaprio plays, is to do his best and see his characters through peril to hope; and he does so magnificently, taking elements of chase thrillers past (not least his beloved 1970s) and present and retooling them for the future.

There’s so much to relish. The film has a Kubrickian satirical absurdism – Penn’s sun-dried, priapic, banally evil soldier mixes several rabid Kubrick generals with Cape Fear’s Max Cady and the Terminator. DiCaprio’s Bob brings a broad slapstick haplessness to his midlife fallibility, on the run in plaid bath robe and grease-gathering hair, forever in search of phone charge and forgotten code words. The frame teems with bit characters, not least in the extended second act, which takes us through a mazy Latino Los Angeles, guided by Benicio del Toro’s unflappable sensei, the journey edited by Andy Jurgensen with Mad Max-like propulsion: beyond the city, the film enters the vacant, violent borderlands of a Sam Peckinpah actioner, and Anderson refashions the car chase with long lenses and fresh moves in the undulating desert roads. Everything looks ravishing in native VistaVision (the second recent film to revive that rich-resolution format, after The Brutalist). And for Anderson’s sixth film in a row, Jonny Greenwood’s score is a key modernising ingredient, shaping sequence after sequence with new timbres, tilted beats and bold attacks. It’s a terrific ride.

► One Battle After Another is in UK cinemas from 26 September.