‘One Battle After Another’ is an American masterpiece

In Paul Thomas Anderson ’s gloriously messy, madcap roller coaster ride through modern America, objects in the rear view may go out of sight, but they don’t disappear.

Political struggles never die in “One Battle After Another,” they just repeat. Or maybe they grow older and become paranoid, pot-smoking, pajama-wearers like Bob Ferguson ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), a washed-up revolutionary living off the grid with his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). The cycles of oppression and resistance are palpably felt in Anderson’s film, a decades-spanning odyssey where gun violence, white power and immigrant deportations recur in an ongoing dance, both farcical and tragic.

But “One Battle After Another” could also be fairly described as a sweet movie about a father coming to terms with his teenage dau