There is a scene in Robert Altman’s dark Hollywood satire The Player in which cynical film executives ask each other when they last actually went to a cinema to see a movie. When one replies that he saw the neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves only the previous evening, another counters: ‘No, I’m talking about a movie-movie,’ which is to say not an example of auteur cinema but rather a piece of all-American entertainment featuring suspense, laughter, violence and a happy ending.

Is it possible for a film to be both? With his new film One Battle After Another, has Paul Thomas Anderson transcended this distinction, achieving a fusion of edge-of-your-seat action and the kind of offbeat, devious psychological drama he has previously explored? Anderson is a star of contemporary cinema who has established himself as a master of the kinetic epic on the one hand, with films such as There Will Be Blood and The Master, and the alienated romance on the other, as with Phantom Thread or Licorice Pizza. Both these genres are woven into One Battle After Another, which is the car-chase action movie that Anderson has been contemplating for the last 20 years.

One Battle After Another centres on the character of washed-out revolutionary Pat Calhoun (Leonardo di Caprio), also known as Ghetto Pat or Rocket Man, a member of an insurrectionary group called ‘The French 75’. Pat is romantically (and improbably) involved with formidable activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) to whom revolutionary violence is an aphrodisiac. Besides her name, Perfidia’s fiery intensity, prong-like extra eyelashes and wing-shaped earrings also signal a character that may be, at least in her own eyes, more than a woman and the embodiment of danger and the revolutionary spirit, whereas Pat comes across as an ordinary and somewhat drugs-addled mortal whose characteristic state of mind is one of pained confusion.

In the film’s opening scene, where The French 75 stage an operation to release migrants being held in a detention centre on the US-Mexico border, Pat clearly has not been fully briefed and is only put in charge of letting off flares to distract the police from the attack. Meanwhile, Perfidia threatens and humiliates the base’s commanding officer, Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn), triggering his pathological sexual obsession with her and a single-minded pursuit of Pat and his daughter Charlene, which culminates, 16 years later, in a relentless chase to the death.

As a sensory cinematic experience animated by a dynamic cast, One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson at his most explosive-propulsive; the film is also infused with Anderson’s considerable cinematic culture. Ahead of the film’s release in America, the director selected five films to be presented on TCM: The Searchers by John Ford (1956) – like One Battle After Another, a flawed protagonist’s quest to rescue an abducted child, and shot like it in spectacular VistaVision (a wide-screen, sharp definition format); The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966), which tells the story of the Algerian insurrection against French colonial rule in cinéma-vérité style, and which Anderson’s antihero Pat Calhoun watches in a drugs-induced haze; The French Connection by William Friedkin (1971), a neo-noir crime thriller culminating in a nail-biting car chase; the action comedy thriller Midnight Run (Martin Brest, 1988), whose fusion of genres Anderson has long admired; and Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty (1988), about a couple whose youthful political activism catches up with them and has a later impact on their family life. These films have all left their mark on One Battle After Another, a film that superabounds with cinematic references. Though he moves the action on at a frantic pace, Anderson finds time, in a supermarket scene, for a brief nod to the classic film noir Double Indemnity before Lockjaw barges into the frame and shoots to kill.

Another hinterland to the film is its main narrative source, Thomas Pyncheon’s 1990 novel Vineland. Anderson previously adapted Pyncheon’s comic-philosophical, hallucinatory universe on to the big screen with Inherent Vice in 2014, the first filmmaker to do so. This time, he borrows only some elements of the book, weaving in other plotlines of his own devising. One significant departure from Vineland has been to make the character of the female revolutionary, originally a white woman with ‘fluorescent’ blue eyes, into a black woman.

This has a calculated and radical effect: everything about Perfidia becomes racialised, especially, perhaps, the intensity of white supremacist Lockjaw’s attraction to her. Lockjaw, the embodiment of toxic masculinity, played by Penn as a reptilian sensualist who moves with the mechanical stiffness of an Action Man figure, thus appears a truly hateful antagonist. The dynamic between the film’s characters becomes aligned with a contemporary politics defined by power: Lockjaw’s villainy is indissociable from his whiteness; when Perfidia severs herself from Pat and their baby daughter, she does so as a revolutionary and a feminist, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Sacrifice’, and declaring: ‘I put myself first and I reject your lack of originality.’

Yet One Battle After Another does not quite bring Pyncheon’s story up to date. Published in 1990, Vineland unfolds in 1984, at the time of Ronald Reagan’s election, and also looks back to 1960s insurrectionary counterculture. Anderson’s film, on the other hand, plays out in an imagined American history hijacked by a shadowy fascist power, an alternate dystopian reality in which, in the words of an exultant skater boy coursing through chaos in the streets: ‘It’s fucking World War III out there!’ This gives the film a heightened and unmoored quality akin to a video game. Politicians and ordinary people are absent, replaced by white supremacists, military police, migrants (collectively represented in the cast by Benicio del Toro as a world-weary martial arts sensei and leader of the undocumented community), and revolutionaries, some of whom are nuns called the Sisters of the Brave Beaver.

In his late-1960s Maoist years, Jean-Luc Godard made La Chinoise, a film about young bourgeois revolutionaries planning a political assassination, and Sympathy for the Devil/One Plus One, which juxtaposes studio footage of the Rolling Stones recording in their London studio and other, disconnected scenes featuring Black Panthers and overlaid with poetry readings. These experimental films were most definitely not ‘movie-movies’. But they responded to the counterculture that was unfolding in France and America at the time of shooting.

Is One Battle After Another a political state-of-the-nation film? It’s difficult to tell. Its reality is in part adjacent to that of The Handmaid’s Tale (the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel), but principally to that of The Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, in which a wily fox and his friends outwit a group of murderous farmers. Trapdoors and tunnels are omnipresent in One Battle After Another, leading in one case to the den of a secret society of racists calling themselves The Christmas Adventurers Club, who sit before a hunting diorama complete with flying pheasant taxidermy and whose rallying cry is ‘All hail St Nick!’. Elsewhere, a podcaster intones solemnly about ‘the corporate overlords extracting value from your life’.

How seriously are we meant to take all this? Not entirely. Despite its hat-tipping to critical race theory and gender politics, One Battle After Another comes over as more of a comedy action film than a political drama. Di Caprio’s performance as Pat, propelled through the film like a ball inside a pinball machine, is particularly effective, ranging from paternal anxiety to half-hearted macho swaggering (‘I know what I’m doing! I know how to drink and drive!’), from hallucinatory paranoia to tiny moments of triumph. ‘I’ve got power!’ the would-be revolutionary whimpers when he finally manages to connect his exhausted phone to a charger. There are entertaining scenes where, in desperate attempts to rescue his daughter from abduction and death, Pat wrestles with the protocols of his underground organisation as though he were trying to get through a customer services switchboard. When asked repeatedly ‘What time is it?’ (‘that is a key question of the underground movement,’ his interlocutor points out chidingly), Pat, who admits to being ‘a little bit high’, is unable to provide the correct answer, vainly tries to reason with the implacable voice of the underground and, pushed beyond endurance, eventually screams ‘You fucking liberal!’ – before being put on hold.

Anderson has in the past made complex films about difficult subjects – the porn industry in Boogie Nights and the Church of Scientology in The Master. One Battle After Another pays lip service to fashionable opinion but does not ultimately engage meaningfully with Trumpian, Antifa or immigration politics. But it is an escapist movie-movie – complete with memorable car chase scene – and a film-nerd’s jape.