“One Battle After Another” is a singular movie-going experience. It contains the sort of immersive, large-scale, emotionally, and intellectually involved blockbuster filmmaking legendary movies are made of. 

I’m not sure if I’m ready to call “One Battle After Another” a legendary movie yet, but director Paul Thomas Anderson’s 10th film is certainly among the best of this decade so far. The contemporaneously set action-thriller feels so prescient I couldn’t help but laugh at times; the film’s absurd sense of humor captures the existential chaos of living through our current political landscape. Despite being written sporadically over 20 years, Anderson’s script feels like it was ripped from the headlines.

“Viva la revolución!” Leonardo DiCaprio, wearing a ragged plaid bathrobe and boxy sunglasses, shouts as he embarks on a journey to save his daughter from a radical military force. DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, also called “Ghetto Pat,” a former revolutionary who has supplanted his political ideology with marijuana in the 16 years since the mother of his daughter was taken from him.

DiCaprio’s performance is predictably great, but I was taken aback by how different it felt from anything he’d ever done. The manic paranoia of a former vigilante activist, reckoning with the consequences of the past, is a similar headspace DiCaprio occupies during some of his best recent work in “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

But there is a tenderness in Bob Ferguson I feel has been purposefully missing from DiCaprio’s performances since his early teenage heartthrob years. Bob is a father and a protector; he spends much of the movie mourning the woman he loved and desperately searching for his daughter.

For a movie as outrageous and fast-moving as “One Battle After Another,” DiCaprio’s truly sweet and emotionally rich performance grounds the insanity. Similarly, while the movie is three hours long, the propulsive pacing and extremely intense score by Jonny Greenwood make the running time fly by.

The pace is helped by the structure of the movie, too, as the plot is mostly a series of chases and escapes. It begins with a long prologue told mostly in montage as Bob meets Perfidia Beverly Hills, played with extraordinary humanity by Teyana Taylor, an impassioned revolutionary who fights with a radical vigilante network, the French 75.

Throughout the montage, we see the French 75 combat Steve Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, a militant white supremacist who runs a ring of migrant detention centers in California. As Bob and Perfidia work to disrupt this fictionalized U.S. government’s fascist state, and fall in love doing it, Lockjaw stalks them. 

When the couple has a child, Perfidia is forced to make a sacrificial choice to protect her family from Lockjaw at the cost of the French 75. In the modern day, Bob and his daughter Willa are living off the grid in the fictional town Baktan Cross, California, where they sporadically keep in touch with the dwindling revolutionary network. 

Meanwhile, Lockjaw is offered a seat at “The Christmas Adventurers’ Club,” a deep state white nationalist cabal, but not before he has to clean a few skeletons out of his closet. Thus, he tells one of his commanding officers, “Make me a reason to be in Baktan Cross,” and the hunt for Bob and Willa begins. 

Penn’s performance as the cartoonishly evil Lockjaw is remarkable. His physicality is caricature-like, and the facial ticks he deploys stick out, but it’s everything beneath his goofy exterior that is truly terrifying. 

Behind Penn’s eyes is this selfish, cruel, and power-hungry drive that makes him appear threatening. An added layer of psychosexual confusion and insecurity lingers just enough to constantly remind you how humiliating it is to be a fascist.

While “One Battle After Another” has many things to say about the world we live in, Lockjaw’s siege on Baktan Cross feels like a terrifying display of the impossibly far-reaching power of a fascist state. The villain’s formidable army tears a community apart, and Anderson dedicates just enough screentime to disparate people and places in the town so the imagery of Lockjaw ordering police to advance on civilians becomes even more heartbreaking. 

Things aren’t all doom and gloom, though. Bob meets Sensei Sergio, played incredibly relaxed by Benicio del Toro, who helps him escape Baktan Cross. For a movie full of explosions, car chases, and shoot-outs, it’s a fascinating story choice to mostly keep Bob out of conflict. 

In fact, whenever Bob tries to take an active role in the violent story unfolding around him, he fails and needs to be bailed out by someone else. At one point, Bob and Sensei are sharing Modelos while driving through the California desert, and Bob tells his friend, “I don’t even know how to do her hair, man.” 

It’s a deeply affecting moment that says so much about why the twisty, shocking story has unfolded thus far. At its core, “One Battle After Another” is about the world we leave behind for generations after us, and particularly the fear among members of Generation X — which DiCaprio and Anderson are both a part of — about the future they’ve ushered in for their children. 

Throughout an insanely tense last act, Willa, played by Chase Infiniti, realizes outside of her father’s bubble, she is a product of a world of violent power struggle. As a consequence of her parents’ actions, the teenager is forced to see and do things Bob never wanted her to. 

Without giving away the ending, the absurd dread about contemporary society that “One Battle After Another” builds in its opening acts gives way to something far more hopeful — at least on its surface — by the end.  

Anderson’s movie has a lot going on, and I’m not done parsing through its character relationships and political implications, but it is, most importantly, an absolute blast. It’s an action movie made by, for my money, one of the best living filmmakers and set to some all-timer needle drops and laugh-out-loud funny performances.

The film conveys its story about how the world cyclically grinds the idealism out of young people by keeping the darkest themes layered beneath exhilarating craft and jaw-dropping spectacle.

In some ways, this movie feels like a culmination of Anderson’s filmography. It has the stoner comedy of “Inherent Vice” and “Punch Drunk Love” while maintaining the introspective character study of “Magnolia” and “There Will be Blood.” 

I may be biased, as Anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers, but I cannot recommend “One Battle After Another” more. I made the trek to Davenport to catch the movie in IMAX, and it left my mind racing from the sheer scale of what I witnessed. It’s the kind of crowd-pleasing blockbuster made even better by sitting with an engaged audience. See it loud and see it big, the ride is worth it.