DiCaprio is a riot as revolutionary

'One Battle After Another' from Paul Thomas Anderson is political and hilarious.

- AMY NICHOLSON

LEONARDO DICAPRIO plays Bob, who is trying to rescue his daughter.

Warner Bros. Pictures.

"One Battle After Another," the name of Paul Thomas Anderson's invigorating political thriller, would also make a fine title for the history of humankind. Whenever I catch myself wishing I'd lived in a calmer era, I'm oddly soothed by asking, Like, when?

Every generation scuffles for something: suffrage, equality, autonomy, decent health, fair pay, even the right to keep on fighting.

When Thomas Pynchon published his 1990 novel "Vineland," a decades-spanning saga about a band of dope-smoking militant hippies from the '60s to the Reagan Era, he seemed resigned that the counterculture had lost the struggle to free America's soul, writing that after Watergate, "the personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible." Yet, Paul Thomas Anderson's fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn't it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight? "Battle," which Anderson also wrote, charts a fictional revolutionary group called the French 75 across 16 years. Headed by the volatile Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), its ranks include Lady Champagne (Regina Hall), Mae West (Alana Haim), Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle) and Ghetto Pete, a.k.a. Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), Perfidia's lover and the future father of her child, Willa, played by the very good Chase Infiniti later in the film as a teen. Under Perfidia's leadership, the French 75 does it all, busting immigrants out of detention centers, detonating politicians' campaign headquarters and shorting out the electricity grid. The dates in which the story starts and stops are deliberately left vague; the movie feels like it was filmed tomorrow.