DiCaprio calls for revolution in the most daring and triumphant premiere of 2025.

Batting and smoking marijuana while nursing a terrible hangover. That's how Bob Ferguson, the crackpot activist played by Leonardo DiCaprio, learns he must flee because the demented soldier with whom he shares an unexpected romantic triangle is after his boss and his teenage daughter. It's not exactly the most opportune time to receive the call to arms of the revolution, but nothing is ideal in the landscape it paints. One battle after another, neither the father-son ties nor the coordination between the cells of a countercultural guerrilla whose members are too brain-broken to remember a password.

After spending most of the last quarter-century examining bygone episodes in American history, Paul Thomas Anderson crashes an acid-laden vehicle into the country's current political climate. He does so by glancing at the Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, a writer whom he already adapted to Pure vice, and that offers just the right amount of hallucinatory stupor to make unthinkable things plausible, like the army turning any town into a war zone without anyone caring too much, or the truly transcendental political decisions being made in underground corridors connecting the suburban homes of Aryan supremacists. Unearthing an almost forgotten format, the VistaVision that mid-20th-century Hollywood reserved for big shows, Anderson films a propulsive farce—practically a string of chases—which, as is usual with the filmmaker, finds revealing veins of truth in the close-ups of a cast in which the useless hero register coexists with the tension of every gesture and microexpression of the antagonist played by Sean Penn, the personification of a virile and, ultimately, ridiculous vileness.