Music
Paul Thomas Anderson’s gripping One Battle After Another positions music as a force against fascism. By Shaad D’Souza.
The sounds of revolution in One Battle After Another
One Battle After Another, the latest film by celebrated American indie auteur Paul Thomas Anderson, barrels forward from its earliest moments. It crackles with fighting energy, rarely stopping for breath. A loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 book Vineland, it spans a period just shy of two decades and runs for nearly three hours, but it feels like it’s over in the blink of an eye.
This is thanks in large part to a funny, twisty script and layered, magnetic performances. Perhaps more than any Anderson film, One Battle After Another makes a central player of its soundtrack: a frenetic and anachronistic mixtape of old-school soul, rock, contemporary hip-hop, and Latin jazz. It in turn makes this surreal action-comedy-war film feel punchy and dynamic. It is hardly a musical, but One Battle After Another is undoubtedly the year’s best “music film”.
Set between the early 2000s and a time roughly approximating the present day, it centres on a network of revolutionaries, their allies and their antagonists. It looks at how revolution can shrink and foment multiple times over the course of generations. Leonardo DiCaprio plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, a revolutionary with a group called the French 75 who bomb government buildings and liberate detained immigrants from ICE-style detention camps on the borders between the United States and Mexico.
Pat is in a relationship with Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by the pop star and dancer Teyana Taylor, a radical soldier from a long line of Black revolutionaries. During a raid of a detention centre, Perfidia detains an army officer named Steven J. Lockjaw, sparking a twisted love triangle that results in the eventual capture of a number of French 75 members. Perfidia disappears and Pat goes into hiding with their newborn baby.
Sixteen years later Pat, now called Bob Ferguson, has become a drunken, stoned layabout, and his and Perfidia’s daughter, Willa, played by newcomer Chase Infiniti, is essentially a parental figure in his life. Lockjaw finds out that the pair is still alive and – in a bid to hide the fact that he once had an interracial relationship from a white supremacist cabal he wishes to join– tries to hunt down Willa, under the assumption that she’s his spawn.
One Battle After Another is Pynchon by way of the Fast & Furious movies. Part of what helps it stay real and gripping is the music and a sense of music fandom that courses through the entire film. From its script to its casting, pop history is essential to the story, even more so than in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’70s- and ’80s-set golden age of porn drama Boogie Nights (1997), or Licorice Pizza (2021), the name of which was taken from a chain of record stores in southern California. If those films centred music as a kind of shared lifeblood between the many disparate tribes of the world, One Battle After Another positions it as a force against fascism, existing beyond language and time.
On a literal level, this manifests in quite a poignant way. When Bob and baby Willa go on the run in the film’s first section, an operative called Billy Goat – played by the academic and avant-pop musician Paul Grimstad – gives them transmitters that, when placed near each other, harmonise and begin to play a kind of lullaby. He impresses on Bob that only the most trusted members of the French 75 hold such devices. Later, when Willa is a teenager, this device, forced upon her by her father, ends up getting her out of a scrape. The tune is mysterious and a little baleful, a signal that both danger and assistance are near.
The cast is filled with musicians – not musicians turned actors, but musicians seemingly cast directly from Anderson’s Spotify profile. The rapper Junglepussy plays a revolutionary also called Junglepussy, and transmutes the witty, forceful commentary present in her lyrics into a character who is provocative and thrillingly real. Alana Haim, a member of the band Haim and the star of Anderson’s last film, appears as another French 75 member, parlaying the ordinary-girl brilliance of her role in Licorice Pizza into something slyer and more subversive.
And then there’s Taylor, who rips through One Battle After Another like a bullet, even though she’s only present for brief snatches of the film. As Perfidia, she takes the entirety of her stage persona – a brash, lascivious, aggressive warrior of a performer, who I’ve seen tear through extraordinarily fast, militaristic choreography without missing a note – and pours it into her character, creating an unorthodox but totally magnetic fusion of the two. In her rough-hewn R’n’B music, Taylor can be combative and steely. She heightens those traits on-screen as a revolutionary who sees herself as part of a divine plan to save America from fascism and violence. I have seen criticism of this role – Ellen E. Jones wrote in The Guardian that Perfidia is a caricature, highlighting a section of the film where she leaves a note for Lockjaw saying, “This pussy don’t pop for you” as an example of Anderson’s inability to write for Black women.
“This pussy don’t pop for you” is Junglepussy’s catchphrase: she often holds up a sign with those words on it when she performs. Giving these words to Taylor’s character feels like a skew-whiff, meta nod to how much of herself each woman put into her role. I imagine for fans of Taylor it will be impossible to watch One Battle After Another and divorce the star from the character, but perhaps that’s the point – Anderson seems to suggest that groundbreaking stars such as Taylor themselves hold revolutionary power in their lyrics.
In the world of One Battle After Another, lyrics do have revolutionary power. A recurring motif in the feature is drawn from Gil-Scott Heron’s immortal song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”: the French 75 use lyrics from the track, part of their “revolutionary texts”, to work out who can be trusted and who is an enemy. It’s a little bit winky, but as you realise how much profoundly left-wing, pro-revolution spirit is imbued in the film, it becomes touching, occasionally devastating. For all the surrealism of Anderson’s world in One Battle After Another, it’s a heartening wink at the audience – a sense that maybe the tools for revolution are already in our possession.
One Battle After Another is screening in cinemas nationally.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "The sound and the fury".
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