One Battle After Anotherof Paul Thomas Andersonis thrilling, clumsy, and seriously serious on the big screen — a “no” to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It is a carnival epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; It's also a love story. The film talks about the failures of the past and present, but insists on the promise of the future. It's brilliantly directed, but what makes it exciting is that it embraces its moment like few American fiction films do. It feels urgently shocking. It's also funny to the point of making you laugh out loud, even when the laughs shake with anger.

One Battle After Another traces the misadventures of a glorious fool, Bob Ferguson - played by a Leonardo DiCaprio who completely rises to the buffoonish occasion - a revolutionary soldier turned hunted terrorist and devoted single father. Set largely in the present, the story takes off some 16 years earlier, during Bob's explosive tenure in the French 75, a radical (presumably fake!) group that shares its name with a cannon and a cocktail that Humphrey Bogart's nightclub serves in Casablanca. The group's beliefs are straightforward enough—equality, freedom—if vague on the details, and Anderson does not explain their revolutionary ideology. Like his characters, he generally prefers to put theory into action.

The fulcrum of the story is the love between Bob and Perfidia Beverly Hills (an electrifying Teyana Taylor), charismatic member of French 75. Courageous and uncompromising, Perfidia cuts the world like a knife. Right from the start, Bob eagerly follows his command during the group's attack on a migrant detention center where, in the dead of night, they and the other insurgents disarm the military guards and free a crowd of men, women and children. It is also there that Perfidia first meets her nemesis, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (a great Sean Penn), whom she easily overpowers with a drawn gun and an unusual command: she orders the seated Lockjaw to stand up, completely, a directive he obeys with an erection that comically pitches a tent in his pants.

It's a crucial moment and an absurd scene, which Anderson exploits to the maximum ridiculousness by filming the erection from below so that it stands out in the scene, emphasizing Lockjaw's helplessness in the face of Perfidia. He is no longer in control of the inmates or his own body, and he is certainly not in control of her. Perfidia effectively disarmed Lockjaw, which instills a mad and perverse desire for her. By forcing Lockjaw to comply, she challenged a regime of power, which dates back to the violent sexual exploitation of enslaved black women by white men, and which the film's villains want to maintain. Lockjaw will spend the rest of the film trying to reassert his supremacy.

One Battle After Another was inspired by Vinelandthe 1990 novel by Thomas Pynchon that Anderson freely drew upon for his singular ends. The novel opens in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan won his second term as president and in the wake of the “Nixonian Crackdown.” Time has moved forward for its comically named post-'60s survivors (Anderson invents his own cartoonish nicknames). Even though “the personnel changed, the Repression continued, growing wider, deeper and less visible”, observes one character. (In a 2015 interview with novelist Steve Erickson that took place at Trump Tower, Anderson talked about Vineland and said he would adapt “or just steal a lot” from Pynchon’s book.)

Anderson doesn't give a name for himself in One Battle After Anotherand I don't remember hearing any characters mention current politicians. Still, it's around 2009, the year Barack Obama's first term began, that French 75 takes over the detention center - during a propulsive, intricately staged and filmed sequence that sets the uplifted tone and rapid pace. The party members are elated about the attack, as excited about its success as Lockjaw is for Perfidia. “Long live the revolution!,” Bob shouts as they make their escape, a battle cry that resonates as he and Perfidia team up, rob banks, have a daughter, split up and run. Everything falls apart, and Bob ends up adrift in a cannabis haze.

Anderson rarely relieves pressure on One Battle After Anotheralthough it slows down a bit when the story shifts to the present. Having gone underground years before, Bob now lives with his daughter, Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti), in a house in Northern California (of course), that land of redwoods, marijuana and paranoia. There, he drinks a lot of alcohol and smokes a lot of marijuana - smoke hangs around his permanently confused face, with his tiny ponytail hanging limply as an emblem of his impotence. His ardor is gone, as is ePerfidia, who left him long ago. To pass the time, he watches Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers -about Algeria's struggle for independence.

It's easy to laugh at Bob, but there's something pathetic about his personal and generational failures. Anderson isn't interested in soliciting the viewer's pity, however (that would be a cheap trick), and both the character and DiCaprio's physically larger-than-life performance - it's a force of comedic nature - keep you from going soft on Bob. You watch the character but never get too deep into his head, in part because Bob never does that either. He is an extremely oblivious man who is notably only driven to act against oppression when it affects him personally, which happens when Lockjaw returns, with scowl and upright posture intact. (Penn's walk suggests the rod is firmly planted in the character's backside.)

What redeems Bob is love: his for Willa and hers for him. This love lights up the rest of the film like a beacon. He brought father and daughter together, creating a conspiracy of two. He helped make Willa who she is, and probably kept Bob from disappearing completely. Love is what forces him out of his refuge and his entropy when Lockjaw - now supported by a shadowy group of Christian white supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers Club - violently returns to the scene, putting Willa in danger. The film takes another turn as Bob and Willa flee Lockjaw, fragmenting the story into separate sections that eventually converge. Things then get even more complicated and scary.

Anderson's gift for putting many pieces into play is fully present in One Battle After Anotherincluding its superb cast. Supporting actors include Regina Hall as Deandra, one of the original French 75, and Benicio Del Toro as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a martial arts instructor who helps run an underground railroad for migrants. In a shrewd casting choice, Tony Goldwyn - a star of the TV series Scandal - appears as one of the leaders of the Christmas Adventurers Club. In that series, which began airing in 2012, the white president (Goldwyn) is having a passionate affair with the black crisis management expert played by Kerry Washington, a romantic fantasy that often felt very much like its ostensibly post-racial moment.

One Battle After Another offers an imaginary world, albeit one that, despite all the absurd names and flights of fancy, feels very much like the real thing. Not everything fits perfectly in the film, which only strengthens its realism; After watching it twice, I'm still sifting through its ideas and images, still thinking about power and race and sex, and whether Perfidia really gets what she deserves, as I continue to savor the emotion the film produces. There are few filmmakers working today who are as skilled as Anderson, and even fewer who could - with the image of a pregnant black revolutionary firing a machine gun - create a cry from the heart that is also a crystallizing image of resistance. It's a scream to keep, wild and exciting, and as American as red, white and blue.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.