One Battle After Another: What Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is really about.

If you’re confused about what’s going on in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another , don’t worry: so is its hero, addled ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). In the movie’s present, which is never precisely identified but looks and feels a lot like now (Bob says he’s 42 and was born “somewhere in the ’80s”), Bob is a rumpled single dad living off the grid, trying his best to raise his 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), without fully understanding the world she inhabits. But even in the past, where he and Willa’s mother (Teyana Taylor) are part of a militant group called the French 75, he’s at something of a loss. As his comrade and lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills, preps the group’s members for a raid on an immigrant detention facility, a befuddled Bob is