How One Battle After Another Imagines an Armed Left

Among the film’s many departures from the novel, one is that it seems to be set approximately in the present—at least to judge from the Mylar blankets used in the immigrant detention centers and the amusing intergenerational debates over “woke” language—though no one on-screen ever refers to the sitting president or the current year or any specific real-world events. If the last two-thirds of the movie are meant to portray America in 2025, then the first third of the movie must take place circa 2009, at the beginning of the Obama presidency, which is not a period remembered for vigilante left-wing groups staging attacks on immigrant detention centers. In its depiction of right-wing state repression of immigrants, and especially with Sean Penn’s memorable performance as a conflicted and buffoonish white supremacist who is no less terrifying for his own comical weaknesses, One Battle After Another eerily evokes the second Trump administration, despite having been written and filmed before it began.

The least believable part is the corresponding existence of a left-wing revolutionary group that physically fights back. And aesthetically, at least, the French 75 resemble the Weathermen less than the right’s conspiratorial image of “antifa supersoldiers” made flesh and projected back into the recent past; they are not nostalgic for an earlier era’s radical chic so much as they are a guess at what our own era’s might look like if it were to take shape. The organization is notably multiracial and multigenerational, communicates via secret code words and homing beacons, and maintains safe houses in sympathetic communities. For the most part, its violence is disruptive rather than lethal, though there are consequential exceptions. There’s a certain joy and carefree camaraderie to it, with Perfidia proposing to have sex with Pat as the bombs they just planted go off. They make resisting fascism look fun, until things go poorly, which inevitably they do. The audience at my screening seemed to be having a total blast, laughing and cheering throughout—and while I experienced One Battle After Another the same way, in hindsight it was a somewhat discordant reaction given the all-too-relevant depictions of immigrant families being torn apart by armed federal agents.

The spectacular exploits of the French 75 seem far-fetched enough—at this moment, in any case—to function as big-screen entertainment. But Benicio del Toro’s tightly organized underground railroad for undocumented immigrants shows a more plausible, and perhaps more durable, model for resisting fascism. Upstairs from a quotidian storefront, del Toro’s Sensei offers DiCaprio’s Bob a guided tour through a makeshift village where Latino families sleep on mats, several to a room, all of them seemingly trained and prepared to respond to federal raids at a moment’s notice. Unlike some of the French 75 members we’ve gotten to know, Sensei speaks fluent Spanish, and he knows the names of the people he’s helping and has made the effort to build community with them. Here, we see ordinary working people just trying to live in peace in a country where armed forces of the state intend violence upon them. Resistance, for them, is not an aesthetic posture or a thrill ride or a rejection of stifling social norms, but a matter of basic survival, and it relies on coordination, trust, and secret procedures designed to keep everyone safe. Most people, after all, aren’t looking to kill or be killed; most people just want to know how to build communities that can defend themselves.