Paul Thomas Anderson’s decision to avoid depicting the political turmoil of the past ten years but to romanticize Sixties political violence in his new film One Battle After Another is a cowardly artistic choice. Adapting Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland is merely an excuse for Anderson to revive his own hipster fetishes — pop music, outré sex-and-violence, plus half-comic secular moralizing.

It starts with Anderson’s recall of the social chaos in which druggy white California revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his black radical consort Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) attack an immigrant detention center, combating the government, represented by military operative Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Their mismatch parodies Vietnam and civil rights era clashes, as if the actual bombings, gunfire, killings, and riots from the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers were laughable counterculture-versus-establishment skirmishes. Anderson’s tomfoolery makes stealthy comment on the battle between liberals and conservatives that has now become lethal. What’s meant to be entertaining is actually callous, dishonest, and reprehensible.

This fantasy may coincide with contemporary turmoil, but its mixture of political absurdity, comic bloodshed, and racial farce merely exploits Millennial confusion. Despite its source in Pynchon’s postmodern paranoia (the subject of Anderson’s earlier adaptation Inherent Vice), the film’s dystopic vision feels modern mostly because it follows the chic progressivism that Hollywood has embraced since the advent of Barack Obama.

Anderson’s Bob-Perfidia-Lockjaw triangle (each name an overly literary pun) is a Pynchon-ization of the conflicts that resulted from Obama’s personal link with Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers and the racial ambiguity that underscored his effect on the American polity.

One Battle After Another is not the first post-Obama movie (Harvey Weinstein once bragged about “the Obama Effect” on Hollywood), but its emphasis on political, racial, and sexual division operates on a new level. Anderson’s large-scale convoluted storyline of multiple characters, quarrels, vendettas, and hostilities actually reflect the Biden era, which provided liberal Hollywood an opportunity to indulge its screwiest fantasies about our national polarization.

Some of Anderson’s madhouse satire is spot-on. Since his nostalgic Licorice Pizza, he has learned to particularize the indie eccentricities that made his earlier movies seem gnomic. The most politically astute scene shows a pothead radical getting stoned while watching The Battle of Algiers. Bob, Perfidia, and Lockjaw go through variations on “new consciousness” apparent in their individual subcults: French 75 (for the left), Christmas Adventure Club (for the right,) and Sisters of the Brave Beaver (for disenchanted black feminists).

Anderson’s pop music hipsterism swaps past romantic associations for new cynicism: “Soldier Boy,” by the Shirelles, turns the S/M sex play between Perfidia and Lockjaw into civil rights irony; “Ready or Not,” by the Delfonics, makes that same irony bewildering; “Dirty Work” uses Steely Dan snark to portray Bob’s cuckoldry; “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” tweaks our shared disillusionment — particularly revolting in the Benecio Del Toro subplot that exalts the harboring of illegal aliens. Worst of all, Anderson uses Tom Petty’s “American Girl” to ridicule the results of what Obama called “America’s original sin.”

That passion play is faultlessly enacted by DiCaprio (a whiz at divided consciousness, as in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Penn (who stresses right-wing racist ambivalence just as he stressed gay self-righteousness in Milk), and Taylor (who makes black female pathology a secondary sexual trait as when firing a machine gun while pregnant — a lewd signifier that outdoes everything in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners). The consequence of this comic book trio’s ideological orgy is a biracial daughter named Willa (Chase Infiniti) who inherits her elders’ murderous impulses. (“Maybe you will save the world” is her mother’s bequest.) Thus, she’s the film’s American Girl heroine — an obscenity. A product of ideological miscegenation, Willa embodies a problem that not even social satirist Pynchon imagined. But Anderson merely insinuates its obvious Obama-based subtext — the generational identity crisis apparent in Willa’s oddball biracial, nonbinary friends who are briefly caricatured. Willa’s confusion goes unexplored.

Anderson’s perversion extends to his imitation of bad ’70s aesthetics. The lighting makes the film look almost colorless, intensifying only for a hilly car chase that is edited incoherently; it’s the one sequence where the IMAX imagery is notable yet boxy, like early television.

It’s a macabre coincidence that One Battle After Another opens so soon after the assassination of peaceable conservative debater Charlie Kirk. The film undeniably romanticizes political assassination. When Perfidia seduces Lockjaw, she taunts him with “Revolutionary violence is the only way!” Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.