The youthful actions of retired, now in-hiding revolutionaries jeopardize the futures of their offspring. That was the basic premise of Sidney Lumet’s 1988 family drama Running on Empty and also One Battle After Another, the comparatively more chaotic and propulsive new movie from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. The spiritually aligned films evocatively consider, nearly 40 years apart, how existentially ill-compatible the comforts of domestic routine are with truly committing to the kind of radical activism that might entail government-building bombings and intricate detention-center rescues, and the consequences that can flare up when you try to mix the two. (To paraphrase one of Battle’s characters, a lot of time can pass without things changing that much.)

Its title nodding to the ongoing struggle to effect social reform outside the system, One Battle After Another begins with a prologue couched inside an alternate version of the aughts, where revolutionary action is portrayed seductively in montage. Then it leaps ahead a little more than 15 years after that, so far into the dulled afterglow that the past seems like a fantasy. Very loosely adapting the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, the film is, post-time-jump, mostly a chase thriller between three people. One is Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), an explosives expert once part of the insurgent French 75 group who had to go underground after the faction’s swaggering, de facto leader (and his lover) Perfidia (Teyana Taylor, doing a lot with a small role) got captured and ratted on everyone before skipping town. Another is Charlene (Chase Infiniti), Pat and Perfidia’s academically excelling, karate class-taking 16-year-old daughter whom single-dad Pat has largely kept in the dark about her parents’ pasts. There’s also Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a bigoted military commander with a Hitlerian ’do and height-compensating shoe lifts who desperately wants to be part of a hush-hush white-supremacist group that calls itself the Christmas Adventurers Club. (Their greeting is “Hail, St. Nick!,” and they want to clean the streets of “lunatics, haters, and punk trash.”) 

Read the full column at South Sound.

Photo credit: Warner Bros.