RULES FOR RADICALS

"If the ends don't justify the means, what does?" - Saul Alinsky

Mad Max meets Mad Magazine via the absurdist brain of Thomas Pynchon—that’s how I’d best describe Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie, One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Chase Infiniti. Watching a 70mm print at Waterloo’s IMAX, I fully expected my mind to be blown after the clamorous reviews I’d read beforehand from sweaty-browed critics. But in the end, it fizzled out like a wet firework—or unexploded ordnance—my mind left completely unmoved by PTA’s “revolution.”

Don’t get me wrong—the film has some funny moments and is impressive in how it manages to pace a nearly three-hour running time and make it seem far shorter. Yet somehow, I came away feeling undernourished by its intellectual and conceptual content as I might from a McDonald’s saver meal. Perhaps if I’d approached the film as a souped-up exploitation/B-movie flick, I wouldn’t have expected greater meaning in what it says about modern America. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. For all intents and purposes, this could just as well have served as a Cheech and Chong movie for all it left me with—but it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, so that brings with it a kind of cineaste Rorschach test, where some see an undisputed masterpiece while others (if they’re allowed) find it a mere passable distraction for a few hours.

"Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man." —The Dude (The Big Lebowski)

DiCaprio’s bummed-out stoner routine as ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson didn’t really work for me, coming off as a slightly more paranoid version of his Rick Dalton from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I felt the role could have been better cast, but Teyana Taylor, playing his partner Perfidia Beverly Hills, was a much stronger choice. Though her screen time is limited, her presence lingers throughout the movie like an invisible force.

Sean Penn’s cartoon villain on steroids, Captain Lockjaw—a cross between an Action Man, Elmer Fudd, and Dr. Strangelove—arrives on screen with a craven sexual fetish for Black women. He might be the central target of our ridicule, but it’s hard not to see him as a subconscious bizarro projection of the white liberal guilt that fuels Paul Thomas Anderson’s own directorial fetishisation—through a political lens that’s undeniably pro-left and pro-Antifa, yet still dripping with its own schisms and contradictions, like Lockjaw himself. By the time the final scene of OBAA rolls around, there’s a subtle, almost mawkishly sentimental incitement to riot as the needle drops into Tom Petty’s American Girl over end title—though in reality, it’ll more likely inspire the white wannabe renegades who've reached middle age having done nothing more rebellious in their life than wear a COVID mask while screaming at those who didn’t.

Given that we live in an age where many activist groups are bankrolled by wealthy donors and corporate entities, the question remains: who’s really sticking it to the Man anymore? Gamers? TikTok activists? What once passed as radical playbook—Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, for instance—has long since been absorbed into academia, politics, and corporate culture. What was once insurgent strategy is now institutional boilerplate. Which makes today’s “counterculture” look less like rebellion and more like the system rehearsing its own pantomime of dissent. Certainly, Teyana Taylor is sticking something to Penn’s Lockjaw, and perhaps the film hints at the symbiosis of power between government, military, and the so-called “freedom fighters,” suggesting that power and resistance are two sides of the same coin—but it never felt that deep to me.

If seen purely as an absurdist farce with no pretensions to profundity, you’ll have a good time. But pretending One Battle After Another represents some watershed countercultural moment in cinema in 2025 is for the birds. The battle lines in America remain as entrenched as ever, and the film ultimately proves to be essentially a cinematic echo chamber—albeit a moderately entertaining one.

Will history prove One Battle After Another a generational classic? Maybe, but I doubt it. It doesn’t seem to say anything too profound about the present moment, merely reaffirming old, well-worn tropes by someone who thinks they’re connected to the zeitgeist but appears more out of the loop about where the genuine counterculture actually sits right now. That is made abundantly clear by the tin-eared dialogue in which Bob asks his daughter about the gender pronouns of one of her friends—a conversation that already feels about ten years out of date.

"We blew it." —Captain America, Easy Rider

Whereas Easy Rider sowed the seeds of its own counterculture’s destruction—which gave it an edge in its time—and Fight Club embraced anti-materialist nihilism as a form of liberation for Gen Xers and Xennials in a way that felt genuinely subversive, One Battle After Another instead seems to endorse the endless perpetuation of “countercultural” cycles, passed down like a cosy lineage from one generation to the next—like one of Bob’s disheveled dressing gowns.

Yet in truth, what modern 'radicals' believe to be “counterculture” today (or even back in the 1960s) hardly seems like anything more than a deep-state psy-op—something DiCaprio’s Ferguson might hallucinate while getting high listening to Steely Dan.

Mind you, watching Bob sober up and get properly black-pilled about his own activist delusions would make a great sequel. 

When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
Wouldn't you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love