words by Josh Mabbutt

If someone had told me that the best film of 2025 would be a Thomas Pynchon-inspired, thunderously dynamic work that borrows its protagonist’s quirks from The Big Lebowski, channels the revolutionary energy of Rage Against The Machine, and delivers a sharp critique of the Trumpian era’s assault on immigrant communities, I would have found it hard to believe. Pulling off such a feat seems nearly impossible for any filmmaker today. Yet, Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t just any filmmaker. His latest film, One Battle After Another, proves that.

Like in his earlier masterpieces, Anderson embeds the story in zany, meticulously crafted worlds, places that feel lived-in, tangible, and teeming with contradictions. In the tradition of his previous films, There Will Be Blood, Licorice Pizza, and Phantom Thread, the film explores the human condition in all its complexity. It observes a reality, a society in motion where revolution and injustice pulse through our screens, our streets, and our daily lives.

Divided into two, the film initially invests its time in showcasing the heyday of the far-left revolutionary group French 75 and their missions of disruption against the authorities. Whether it is bombing empty buildings, blackmailing companies and government officials, or assisting in liberating immigrants on the brink of deportation, the group is busy and active, a true force that bows to nobody, until the group begins to implode.

The growing caution of members like Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) clashes with the feverish determination of others to keep the fight alive, igniting a turning point in the group’s history. Perfidia (Teyonah Taylor), Pat’s partner, insists on continuing her revolution, leaving Pat and their newborn child struggling to pick up the pieces of a crusade that has moved beyond them. Here, Anderson’s vision sharpens: the film becomes a meditation on Black womanhood, showing Perfidia’s fierce agency and the personal costs it exacts, even as her daughter grows up—innocent, inquisitive, yet inheriting the tension, resilience, and revolutionary legacy of her mother, hinting at both hope and ongoing struggle.

At this junction, Nikki Giovanni’s poem 'Revolutionary Dreams' resonates with the same reflective power, examining the roles of Black women in revolution, both in action and in cautious observation. Like the parallel between Perfidia and her daughter Charlene/Willa (who operates under her birth name and a fake identity – Chase Infiniti), Giovanni probes the gulf shaped by time and temperament while highlighting the transformative adaptability of revolutionary spirit. Throughout history, revolution has often been costumed with masculine connotations. Whether it be revolutions targeted at a wealthier bourgeois class or a colonial power, it is the men involved who are often presented as martyrs or heroes. Giovanni and Anderson resist this. In both the film and the poem they remind us of the dynamic and fierce agency of black women involved in revolutionary action, historically and today.

In Giovanni’s poem, the speaker is positioned in the comfort of reflection, speaking not as a protester or public figure, but instead within the privacy of self. This is integral because, in its nature, the poem is about the personal, not the universal. The repeated involvement of the first-person “i” recognises how the speaker is fixated on articulating their own experience within the safety of their own conditions. The lowercase “i” assists with this, dressing it down to exist as an informal recognition of self. 'Revolutionary Dreams' is unafflicted by the need to be a proclamation or political gesture; it is driven instead by nuance and unbridled honesty. Additionally, the free verse, vacancy of punctuation, and tonally reflective materials of the poem cradle the content and allow the speaker to remain unchained by structural features. Even before the poem’s message can be digested, Giovanni ensures the audience is aware that the piece is not about convention, but instead about resistance. The organisation of Giovanni’s message being unyielding to typical structural features and the stream-of-consciousness stylings dialogue a willingness to be unconventional and strive for liberation from such forms. In this, Giovanni resoundingly illustrates her attitude.

Here at the heart of the poem, Giovanni combs through the juxtaposition of the title itself, the conflict between the material need for revolution and the utopian horizons modelled through the act of dreaming. Throughout the poem, this binary ebbs and flows as the speaker dreams of conquering America, “to show these White folks how it should be done,” and at the same time, of being ‘explosively critical’ through her analysis and precision of thought. Is she wanting to revolt through conversation and aggression? Can both be achieved? Do they share anything between them? Is Giovanni purposefully confusing material revolution with a revolution of thought? Perhaps the answer to that final question is yes, because Giovanni doesn’t end the poem there. Instead she finds a new direction to take, and continues the trajectory of the poem, albeit with some gripping touches of reflection.

For Perfidia, these confusions also amount. Like Giovanni herself, Harriet Tubman, Assata Shakur, and many other black female revolutionaries, Perfidia exists to bruise and brutalise the status quo. And like these courageous women before her, Perfidia’s revolution is on her own terms. Where Giovanni’s speaker formalises the poem as a personal expression, we too see this intention with Perfidia’s actions. As much as she finds herself tenaciously attached to the cause of the French 75, it is clear that Perfidia’s revolution is of a personal nature. Yes, she is ultimately fixed upon the liberation of others and the destruction of the powers that be, but in her decision to leave behind her daughter and her romantic partner, we recognise that Perfidia is also fixed on her own liberation, away from the constructs of family, responsibility, motherhood, and her sexualisation by the villainous Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Her escape across the US-Mexican border, depicted in the film's early moments, reinforces Anderson’s characterisation of Perfidia, as the audience comes to realise that she is in conflict with losing her revolutionary self through the process of domestication and objectification. Her metaphorical ‘ghost’ looms over her evasion of Lockjaw and the question of her own daughter’s future. For Perfidia and Giovanni’s narrator, their identity is evidently shackled to their revolutionary actions. They both fight to change the world for the better, they both fight to liberate those who are oppressed, and they both fight because of the historical and familial legacies that exist around them. But more importantly, they fight because they have to. Being a woman means you have to fight for your rights to be protected and represented. Being black means you fight to survive in a world that has violently persecuted you. And being both black and a woman means that fighting is necessary not just for your survival, but for the security of all those like you. In this, we can see that Perfidia leaves her daughter behind in the comfort of her home with Pat, not because she is a coward, but because she is brave enough to realise her daughter will never be safe unless someone is fighting against those who will one day seek to harm her.

In identifying this motivation, we see patterns that emerge. For Perfidia, abandonment could be recognised as sacrifice, a process of martyrdom that acknowledges how her daughter can be saved from the same life of necessary revolution. Anderson doesn’t give Perfidia a moment to return to her daughter or meet her again, perhaps because it isn’t needed in the narrative, but also because it symbolises Perfidia’s sacrifice as something permanent, like her revolutionary spirit. This is also clear when Perfidia’s mother warns Pat about the historical legacy attached to her bloodline, a lineage of revolt that is unshakable. Additionally, the delivery of Willa to a convent of revolutionary nuns highlights the same pattern emerging. Most of the nuns are Black women and recognise Perfidia’s name. Their shared lore and shared experience as Black female revolutionaries is likened to the behaviour of nuns: personal sacrifice for the good of something universal. Their Blackness connects them through the shared experience of oppression and the act of required defiance. In being united, they recognise the uniqueness of their own experience and the community that comes from it. For Giovanni’s speaker, the desire to determine the personal before they can impact the universal is key. Perfidia’s sacrifice is born out of her inability to settle and accept the world for how it is; Giovanni’s speaker isn’t at that stage yet, but the poem represents this turning point with clarity. 

For the narrator of 'Revolutionary Dreams', the act of waking up is the transition point from lofty ambition to reality. Whereas some might identify this ‘grounding’ as a chance for the speaker’s revolutionary ambitions to fade, it is instead assembled as a revelatory moment, where the speaker moves forward by acting inwardly rather than outwardly. At this turning point, the poem changes direction: 'to stop the riot and negotiate the peace/then I awoke and dug/ that if I dreamed natural'. The verb 'dug' inspires us to witness the speaker as a figure who recedes beneath to build up. It additionally helps us zero in on the value of this moment, as the act of digging can lead to riches, treasures, and value that might be submerged beneath the surface. The resource mined by the speaker is valued not because of its monetary worth, but instead because it helps stabilise her sense of who she is and what she needs to do. In essence, the discovery made by the speaker is that revolution doesn’t have to be explosive, but instead radical in a different sense. For her, the revolution she aspires to fortify is the act of being in acceptance of herself. In establishing that she needs to be a “natural woman,” and do what 'natural women' do, the speaker asserts that her Black femininity is something that she needs to embrace. Does this mean that Giovanni is suggesting that black women are forced into being inauthentic? If that is true, she unlocks the answer to revolution in something more radical and more subtle: being yourself.

Perfidia arguably struggles to move past some of the limitations enforced by her revolutionary activities. Yes, she knows who she is and is authentic enough not to apologise for being herself, while still saddled with problems that impact Black women every day such as fetishisation. Lockjaw’s sexualisation of and his desire to dominate Perfidia to fulfil his own fantasies of being sexually submissive to her in reverse condemns Perfidia’s revolutionary ambitions. By forcing her into witness protection in a suburban house where she feels imprisoned by domesticity, Lockjaw subjects Perfidia to a banality that is inauthentic and limiting to her dreams of changing the world. Her escape from her own domestic environment with Pat is made even more hellish by Lockjaw’s ensnaring of her in the confines of his fetish. This limits Perfidia’s agency and, therefore, her ability to continue being a revolutionary. Both geographically and visually, she is marooned from her daughter’s life and from our sight. However, for her daughter, Charlene, this same fate isn’t promised. For Charlene, the absence of her mother and the demolition of her perceived safety by Lockjaw’s armed forces, who are hunting her down, cannonballs her onto a journey of self-discovery. Whereas she does later kill one of her pursuers, Charlene isn’t made to follow in her mother’s footsteps, but instead adopts a revolutionary spirit whose flame burns bright rather than lead to self-immolation. Charlene, like the poem’s speaker, is transformed by looking inwards and reflecting on herself, rather than attempting to tear down the world. The caution taught to her by Pat positions her as a person who embraces the revolutionary antics and beliefs of her parents, but is also able to recognise the subtle radicalness of being herself and doing things in her own way. 

At the film’s close, Charlene’s growth is visualised through the calming, resolute act of attending a protest on her own terms. Pat accepts this, although with caution, and like us, watches Charlene blossom into herself with the same politics, courage, and ferocity as her mother, but not her recklessness. Charlene, like the speaker in Giovanni’s 'Revolutionary Dreams', is capable of existing within the liminality present between the past and the possible future, learning that revolution begins with the self even as it reverberates outward. They acknowledge that the revolution hasn’t achieved its goals, and in this, acknowledge that it must begin with individual agency before the universal can be repaired. This discipline, ultimately for both Charlene and the speaker, rewards a revelatory new way of seeing the hindrances that arise from both internal challenges and the pressures and problems of the external. 

In today’s world, where racism, misogyny, and white supremacy persist, Giovanni’s poem and Anderson’s film resonate with undiminished urgency. The grotesque, white supremacist 'Christmas Adventurers' in One Battle After Another embody the ongoing presence of nefarious powers, a reminder that oppression continues to operate at the highest levels of society. The revolution, both texts insist, is far from over; black women are continuously forced to assert themselves, resist, and create spaces of liberation because the structures that marginalise them remain intact.

For Giovanni, the revolutionary act is an intimate, personal assertion of selfhood: being a 'natural woman' in a world that demands erasure or compromise. For Perfidia and her daughter Charlene, Black female revolution lives through action, sacrifice, and resilience, a legacy of courage passed across generations. Both texts illuminate the duality of being a Black female revolutionary; the fight is outward against oppression, but it is also inward, sustaining identity, selfhood, and agency in the face of structural and interpersonal violence. Together, they assert that Black female revolution is both radical and necessary, ongoing and unyielding, and that the struggle for justice, representation, and liberation will persist as long as oppressive powers remain in control.