'One Battle After Another' review: Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is entertaining, but uneven action comedy saved by Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn

Part way through "One Battle After Another," Leonardo DiCaprio’s chronically stoned Bob places a panicked call to the French 75, the leftist terrorist network he once worked for. His cover has been blown and the law is after him, but the unhelpful phone agent is asking for long-forgotten passwords and security phrases. "I can’t remember any more of this code speak," Bob pleads.

"Maybe," the agent replies, "you should have studied the rebellion text a little harder."

It’s one of the funniest and most relatable scenes in Anderson’s entertaining if uneven comedy, a gonzo journey through America’s extremist political landscape. The story borrows loosely from "Vineland," a 1990 novel by the absurdist Thomas Pynchon, so the characters include a stiff-spined Army colonel named Steven J. Lockjaw (an excellent Sean Penn) and a fiery Black revolutionary named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Overall, "One Battle After Another" is mostly fun, fast-moving and a little far out, though its message is anything but clear.

The story begins as Bob, an explosives expert, and Perfidia, a natural-born leader, liberate immigrants from a California detention center. When Perfidia encounters the overseer, Lockjaw, it’s kinky love at first sight (they really, really like guns) and the two keep going even as she and Bob welcome a child. Many quiet years later, after Perfidia disappears, Lockjaw comes after Bob — or maybe he’s after that child, now a moody teen named Willa (Chase Infiniti).

Though Anderson tries to update Pynchon’s material — the war is no longer on drugs but on immigration — the satire still feels date-stamped. When the French 75-ers decry "the imperial state" and the "fascist machine," they sound like products of the 1960s, not the new millennium. Lockjaw, the uptight military pervert, is a too-familiar effigy straight out of "Dr. Strangelove" (1964). Then there’s the wholesome-sounding Christmas Adventurers Club, which is actually a hidden cabal of well-connected white supremacists.

Anderson is at his best when he takes his subjects seriously ("Punch-Drunk Love," "The Master") instead of striking a pose of wry detachment (as on his other Pynchon adaptation, "Inherent Vice"). Here, his thematic focus is fuzzy: The revolutionaries often sound shrill and juvenile, yet the movie clearly idolizes Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), a karate teacher who runs an underground migrant shelter. (The migrants, by the way, are pretty much props; we never really meet one.) What saves the movie are DiCaprio’s endearingly zonked-out Bob, Penn’s comically ruthless Lockjaw and some behind-the-scenes masterstrokes from composer Jonny Greenwood and cinematographer Michael Bauman.

In the end, "One Battle After Another" works best as a kind of elevated action-comedy rather than as any kind of commentary. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the 1971 Gil Scott-Heron song that plays over the closing credits, is the sharpest critique in the film.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com