How One Battle After Another Imagines an Armed Left
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth film, seizes our attention in the first of its 162 minutes and doesn’t let go until the final needle drop. As soon as the Warner Bros. logo fades, we are ringside for a radical cell’s audacious raid on an immigrant detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border, culminating in the release of the migrants from their cages, the zip-tying of their captors, and the over-the-top sexual humiliation of the ranking officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) by the even more absurdly named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Perfidia is part of a clandestine left-wing terrorist ring called the French 75 that commits armed bank robberies and bombings in pursuit of a vaguely defined agenda encompassing open borders, abortion rights, and racial justice; it also includes her boyfriend, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), and a gang of ragtag insurgents played by Regina Hall, Wood Harris (who portrayed Avon Barksdale on The Wire), and Alana Haim of the band Haim.
This is all prelude; by the end of the first act, Perfidia has gone into witness protection and turned rat, some of her former comrades have been killed as a result, and Pat and their biracial baby daughter, Charlene, have gone into hiding under the fake names Bob and Willa Ferguson. Sixteen years pass, and then the breathtaking cat and mouse sequence that dominates the film—featuring the kidnapping of a teenaged Willa (Chase Infiniti), a scene-stealing Benicio del Toro as a karate instructor running a hidden sanctuary city, a Klan-esque elite secret society of white supremacists, and some riveting desert car chases—can properly begin. It’s complicated and frankly tedious to summarize in a paragraph or two, but it washes over you with kinetic intensity on-screen.
Anderson, the cineaste-beloved auteur, has probably never made such a populist crowd-pleaser, which is a strange thing to say about a sprawling Thomas Pynchon adaptation centered on left-wing revolutionary violence against a fundamentally racist American police state. But One Battle After Another has already delivered Anderson’s biggest box office opening to date and is almost certainly the most critically hyped movie of 2025, indicating that something—Gen X star power, propulsive action sequences, stoner banter, perhaps even radical politics itself—is breaking through. Somehow, a slacker epic decades in the making turns out to be exactly the movie for right now.
Left-wing political violence, or at least the fantasy of it, is having a moment. After the September 10 murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Vice President JD Vance hosted Stephen Miller on Kirk’s podcast, where Miller pledged to crack down on “the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” without presenting any evidence that such organizations exist. On September 22, the Trump administration designated antifa a domestic terrorist organization, describing the decentralized political movement as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” A study released days later by the Center for Strategic and International Studies claimed that in the first half of 2025, attacks by “left-wing extremists” outpaced those by right-wing extremists for the first time in 30 years.
Of course, Trump’s proposed crackdown on the left might also be considered political violence, and the observation that Trump’s government is tyrannical, oppressive, thuggish, and seemingly unchecked is, by now, commonplace—but the idea that the left could find itself with no viable options to resist other than to take up arms remains unsayable except on the fringes of discourse. The actual organized left and the donor networks that fund it, including frequent Trump bogeyman George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, remain in practice almost categorically nonviolent. And a striking feature of the progressive reaction to Kirk’s death is how many influential voices immediately rushed to forswear political violence. “The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence,” wrote Ezra Klein in a much-criticized column the day after Kirk’s murder, in which the New York Times columnist went out of his way to praise Kirk as “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion”—this just days after Klein’s previous column characterized the Trump administration as dangerously authoritarian.
Notions of armed struggle against an oppressive regime have thrived largely in the realm of fiction: The 2024 movie Civil War grimly envisioned a United States riven by warring factions, none of which seemed clearly ideologically defined, while the acclaimed Star Wars spinoff Andor portrays anti-fascist violence as righteous and legitimate. Political violence may make for good science fiction, in other words, but it’s not something that many leading progressives are ready to endorse in the real world.
One Battle After Another, while not quite sci-fi, is the latest example of an imagined left willing to resist by any means necessary. Fittingly, Anderson’s rebels are something of a throwback. In the developed West, the last major period of radical left-wing violence erupted around 50 to 60 years ago, in the era that saw the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, and the Weather Underground in the United States, among others. The last of these has stirred the popular imagination far out of proportion to its actual size and influence on real events, and is an obvious inspiration for the French 75 in One Battle After Another (in fact, the film’s title comes directly from the Weathermen).
Anderson has acknowledged that the film, which he’s been working on for 20 years, is very loosely based on Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which is set primarily in the Reagan era and features a group of radical ex-hippies whose heyday roughly chronologically aligns with that of the Weathermen. The Western intelligentsia of the 1960s and ’70s at least flirted with the more violent movements on the left, often to the consternation of the right—whether that was The New York Review of Books publishing a diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its cover in 1967 or Leonard Bernstein hosting the Black Panthers at a trendy dinner party in 1970, immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s “radical chic” essay, or simply in the lasting popularity and critical acclaim of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which DiCaprio’s character watches on television at one point in One Battle After Another.
Among the film’s many departures from the novel, one is that it seems to be set approximately in the present—at least to judge from the Mylar blankets used in the immigrant detention centers and the amusing intergenerational debates over “woke” language—though no one on-screen ever refers to the sitting president or the current year or any specific real-world events. If the last two-thirds of the movie are meant to portray America in 2025, then the first third of the movie must take place circa 2009, at the beginning of the Obama presidency, which is not a period remembered for vigilante left-wing groups staging attacks on immigrant detention centers. In its depiction of right-wing state repression of immigrants, and especially with Sean Penn’s memorable performance as a conflicted and buffoonish white supremacist who is no less terrifying for his own comical weaknesses, One Battle After Another eerily evokes the second Trump administration, despite having been written and filmed before it began.
The least believable part is the corresponding existence of a left-wing revolutionary group that physically fights back. And aesthetically, at least, the French 75 resemble the Weathermen less than the right’s conspiratorial image of “antifa supersoldiers” made flesh and projected back into the recent past; they are not nostalgic for an earlier era’s radical chic so much as they are a guess at what our own era’s might look like if it were to take shape. The organization is notably multiracial and multigenerational, communicates via secret code words and homing beacons, and maintains safe houses in sympathetic communities. For the most part, its violence is disruptive rather than lethal, though there are consequential exceptions. There’s a certain joy and carefree camaraderie to it, with Perfidia proposing to have sex with Pat as the bombs they just planted go off. They make resisting fascism look fun, until things go poorly, which inevitably they do. The audience at my screening seemed to be having a total blast, laughing and cheering throughout—and while I experienced One Battle After Another the same way, in hindsight it was a somewhat discordant reaction given the all-too-relevant depictions of immigrant families being torn apart by armed federal agents.
The spectacular exploits of the French 75 seem far-fetched enough—at this moment, in any case—to function as big-screen entertainment. But Benicio del Toro’s tightly organized underground railroad for undocumented immigrants shows a more plausible, and perhaps more durable, model for resisting fascism. Upstairs from a quotidian storefront, del Toro’s Sensei offers DiCaprio’s Bob a guided tour through a makeshift village where Latino families sleep on mats, several to a room, all of them seemingly trained and prepared to respond to federal raids at a moment’s notice. Unlike some of the French 75 members we’ve gotten to know, Sensei speaks fluent Spanish, and he knows the names of the people he’s helping and has made the effort to build community with them. Here, we see ordinary working people just trying to live in peace in a country where armed forces of the state intend violence upon them. Resistance, for them, is not an aesthetic posture or a thrill ride or a rejection of stifling social norms, but a matter of basic survival, and it relies on coordination, trust, and secret procedures designed to keep everyone safe. Most people, after all, aren’t looking to kill or be killed; most people just want to know how to build communities that can defend themselves.
This is one of the film’s more hopeful notes, and it’s a striking contrast with the relentlessly bleak vision of the other major recent movie about 2020s America, Ari Aster’s Eddington, which portrays both left and right as spiraling into algorithmically encouraged madness amid a threadbare social fabric. The emotional core of One Battle After Another is the father-daughter relationship between the usually stoned and drunk but well-meaning Bob and the fiercely self-reliant Willa, which lends the stunning climactic chase sequence real human stakes. To Anderson, at least, social bonds and familial love still exist and still represent something worth fighting for.
As in the film, today’s anti-fascist left faces long odds. Recently, Ezra Klein asked Ta-Nehisi Coates why progressives are losing right now, to which Coates replied, “We’re losing because there are always moments when we lose.” Klein called this attitude fatalistic. To that, Coates pointed out that generations of his ancestors struggled unsuccessfully against enslavement and “died in defeat, in darkness,” adding, “The honor that I draw out of this is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.”
Coates could have been citing One Battle After Another, whose title implies and whose story eventually reaches a similar conclusion. One generation’s failure to defeat fascism becomes the next generation’s shot at redemption, and the next after that, one battle after another. It’s not much consolation, but under our present circumstances it’s the only honest one.