Glory be, I really liked and admired Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. It’s enthralling, it’s hard-hitting, it’s up-to-the-minute in its topicality, it’s drawing on and doing full justice to a multitude of genres including action, comedy, suspense, and the political thriller — plus it’s got a mesmerizing, undulating, hill-and-valley climactic car-chase scene like nothing I’ve seen before, and I’ve seen ten thousand car-chase scenes in my time.

Overall, One Battle After Another is the complete package of filmgoing delights. It’s everything movies made in the United States should be right now.

And this film is brought to you by Paul Thomas Anderson, the high-culture auteur responsible for such portentous works as There Will Be Blood and The Master. Here, he’s loosely adapted and updated Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which is about 1960s radicals under fresh attack in the Ronald Reagan era, on the run once again from federal forces in an ever more insane right-wing environment.

One Battle After Another arrives in theaters only a few weeks after I was charmed by Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, another example of a generally snooty director going for genre movie pleasures and coming up with something rough-edged and delightful. If this is a trend, it’s an unlikely and marvelous one, and I hope to see it continue until zany, freewheeling Michael Haneke screwball comedies are enchanting us all at the multiplex.

If there’s any justice — which is sometimes doubtful — One Battle After Another ought to win an Academy Award in nearly every feature film category. Cinematographer Michael Bauman’s rich, raw imagery, achieved by shooting in the old format VistaVision, like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, is certain to be nominated. And surely Leonardo DiCaprio must triumph as Best Actor, because he’s simply outdone himself here. Who else could play the agonies of single-parenting a rebellious teenage girl in grotesquely terrible circumstances with more comically inspired self-pity?

DiCaprio plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, an underground revolutionary who loses his ferociously militant love Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) in traumatic circumstances when Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) leads the charge in destroying their far-left paramilitary group, the French 75. In an edgy and absurd early encounter, Perfidia sexually humiliates Lockjaw, mobilizing his twisted actions from that point on. He develops a sexual obsession with Perfidia that provides her the opportunity to escape imprisonment in exchange for ratting out her comrades. Ultimately, she flees to Mexico.

Fifteen years later, Pat and daughter Charlene — under the aliases Bob and Willa Ferguson — are laying low in a remote Northern Californian sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. Perpetually stoned among the redwoods, Bob is both a paranoid burnout and doting dad, trying to raise his spirited teenage daughter as safely and normally as possible, in a state of ignorance about his past or her mother’s fate.

Then their old foe, Lockjaw — now promoted to colonel and hoping to join a white supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club — suddenly returns to the hunt for the few surviving members of French 75. Bob and Willa are forced to go on the run again, aided by Bob’s old comrade-in-arms Deandra (Regina Hall) and Willa’s karate teacher Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro). He’s a leader of the undocumented Baktan Cross community, conducting an updated underground railroad up from the Mexican border, and his superb competence creates a wry contrast to his friend Bob’s yammering hysteria.

It’s one long chase from then on, alternately harrowing and hilarious, and sometimes both at once.

But don’t let the cartoonish character names and flailing comedy fool you — this film is so startling in its political intensity, it puts all other American pop culture to shame right now. It begins with a French 75 raid on an immigrant detention center roughly fifteen years ago (so that’s the start of Barack Obama’s presidency, isn’t it?), which succeeds so spectacularly it quickly establishes the link between youthful ecstatic thrills and revolutionary action that tends to burn hot and flame out. Perfidia is so turned on by one mission, she begs explosive expert Pat/Bob for sex right on the spot, while he’s pleading with her to keep running and sputtering, “But that bomb is set to go off in two minutes!”

A weighty sense of the Left’s past failures to impede the ever-sicker rightward political march of this nation since the 1970s is central to One Battle After Another. The scene in which a drugged-out Bob is on the couch in his bathrobe watching The Battle of Algiers for what’s clearly the umpteenth time is absolutely going to hurt. But it’s countered by the film’s anarchic energy and insistent hope. Bob’s daughter and Sensei St Carlos’s student Willa — who brings an impressive newcomer to the screen in Chase Infiniti — represents the younger generation taking up the fight, and she comes to share her teacher’s steady, matter-of-fact attitude toward “one battle after another.”

St Carlos is the film’s model for trustworthy resolve and a smart, unwavering approach to building contingency plans and a network of reliable allies throughout various systems in order to continue the fight regardless of inevitable raids, setbacks, and violent upheavals. He combines unflappable staunchness with a lively enjoyment of human absurdity that’s so endearingly acted, I feel I’ve never appreciated del Toro enough, and I’ve been a fan since The Usual Suspects (1995). He and Penn will very likely be contending for Best Supporting Actor honors in the upcoming awards season.

In short, One Battle After Another is the film to see. See it a couple of times. It’s got excellent traction with both critics and the public right out of the gate, but it was an expensive $130 million gamble, and it’s important that this movie succeed. It’s so pointed in its critique of the power elite in this country, not just as self-serving capitalists routinely screwing the citizenry but also as aging monsters addled by long-held racist fixations that are all tangled up with deep sexual psychosis. This isn’t a new portrayal of course but it’s rare in American films aiming at popular acceptance.

And how often in recent years do we find a film clearly meant to be inspirational for the Left? See it. Go now.