Leonardo DiCaprio Exposes the Shocking True Stories Behind Oscar Front-Runner One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson has another one on his hands. Not a shock, I know, but the early response to his new film, One Battle After Another, is wild even by PTA standards.

• In theaters Friday 26 September — yep, go ahead and add it to your watchlist.
• Reviews: Rotten Tomatoes at 98% and Metacritic at 96. One 5-star review even called it the 'best film of the year' and singled out Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and big-screen newcomer Chase Infiniti.
• Writer-director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and Chase Infiniti.

The setup

DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a washed-up single dad who used to be a firebrand revolutionary. It is 16 years since the movement days, and he is trying to raise a teenage daughter, stay off the grid, and avoid the internet like it is radioactive. Then his old nemesis surfaces, and Bob gets dragged back into a world he barely recognizes. Helicopters over the small town, a daughter he is desperate to protect (not always gracefully), and, yes, a surprising reliance on her karate teacher — it is a pressure cooker. At one point, Bob is home alone, stoned, and the past literally shows up at the door. You can feel Anderson grinning at the chaos he is constructing.

'Some of the best laid plans of revolutionaries seem to implode in on themselves.'

Old radicals, new ghosts

While the story is fictional, Anderson is clearly playing with real history. The film is loosely drawn from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, and the on-screen revolutionary collective — the French 75 — borrows DNA from the Weather Underground.

DiCaprio says Anderson looked at how late-60s radicals who fought imperialism, the Vietnam War, and for civil rights were a multicultural group that eventually had to scatter, assimilate, and vanish into everyday life — after risking everything for an ideology. The movie asks: what happens when that ideology comes roaring back decades later to confront the people who once lived by it?

The antihero texture

PTA builds Bob as a guy who wants to be a decent father without surrendering his principles, and the movie keeps undercutting him with real-world mess: digital paranoia, generational gaps, and forces way bigger than any one person. He is not a role-model dad, but he is a stubbornly human one, and the film surrounds him with imperfect allies as things escalate. They are outmatched, outgunned, and still charging — classic Anderson antiheroes, frazzled and oddly funny even when the stakes get heavy.

Perfidia Beverly Hills steals scenes (and then some)

One of the film’s most important figures is Teyana Taylor’s fantastically named Perfidia Beverly Hills — a fellow French 75 member and Bob’s former partner-in-every-sense back in the movement days. Taylor goes electric here: volatile, sharp, impossible to pin down. For the character, she pulled from real-life inspirations, including Assata, the autobiography of Black Liberation Army activist Assata Shakur — a book she already loved that also happened to be sitting on Anderson’s table when they first talked about Perfidia. Taylor also says she poured in personal history: as a Black woman, being forced into strength and survival mode is familiar territory. She did not agree with all of Perfidia’s choices, but she understood where they came from, and you can feel that lived-in tension onscreen.

Timely without trying

Even though Anderson started writing this roughly 20 years ago, the movie stares right into the stuff we are still arguing about (and living through): police violence, the brutal treatment of immigrants, and extremist ideologies moving in elite spaces. It is not subtle about the parallels, and that immediacy gives the film a jolt. Regina Hall notes that the timing was not intentional, but the overlap with the present is hard to miss. Teyana Taylor puts it bluntly: if the shoe fits, wear it — and maybe ask why it still fits in 2024. The hope, they say, is that the film sparks uncomfortable but necessary conversations.

Bottom line: this is PTA working in thriller mode with a bruised heart, a sharp political memory, and a cast that swings for the fences. If the early raves are any indication, One Battle After Another is one you will be hearing about for a while. In theaters Friday 26 September.