THE WAR AT HOME

"One Battle After Another."

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

At a crucial moment in "One Battle After Another," Paul Thomas Anderson's electrifying new action thriller, someone cries out, "Who are you?!" A fair question. The man being asked is Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, in a past life, was known as Pat, Ghetto Pat, and Rocket Man. The movie opens in that past life, with Pat a member of the French 75, a ragtag band of militants who free imprisoned migrants and bomb the offices of pro-life politicians. Their objective is for America to one day be "free from fear," to quote Pat's partner, who has only one name, Perfidia Beverly Hills, but it's enough. She's played by Teyana Taylor, who lit up the independent drama "A Thousand and One" (2023) as an excon determinedly raising a son. Here, with a flinty gaze and revolutionary fervor, Taylor casts maternal instinct to the winds. In a startling image, a pregnant Perfidia fires off rounds with a machinegun butt pressed against her swollen belly. You worry about the poor kid's ears as you jam fingers into your own.

The film's opening half hour is loud, tense, and extraordinarily propulsive: we follow the French 75 through raids, robberies, blown-up buildings, and smashed-up cars. Compounding the cacophony is a Jonny Greenwood score that veers between manic percolation-imagine a xylophone humping a coffeepot and grandly operatic surges of synth. The music sweeps us up in the queasy thrill of revolt, but also in the heat and momentum of an impetuous romance. Perfidia and Pat are like an Antifa-pilled Bonnie and Clyde, minus the impotence.