Bob Ferguson, the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, is a familiar sort of burnout. He’s a single dad shambling around his secluded California home, watching old movies and smoking weed while he fuzzily recalls his salad days as a revolutionary. He doesn’t own a cellphone, and he barks angrily at his teenage daughter’s friends when they come up his driveway. His paranoia, played with clumsy charm by a mustachioed and bleary-eyed Leonardo DiCaprio, is half-cocked and somewhat comical. But Bob’s behavior, One Battle After Another argues, is also entirely justified because of the terrifying brutality of the world—a reality that crashes into Bob’s hazy reverie to create an electrifying, thoughtful blockbuster.

The credits cite as inspiration Thomas Pynch

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