It feels like a sort of blessing that a year so mired in misery, completely defined by morally bankrupt political leaders and their wealthy overlords who alternate between capitulation and control, contains an exceptional movie that turns the deliberate unraveling of free society into a ferocious entertainment. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was written and shot comfortably before the last U.S. presidential election ushered in a era of farcical corruption and institutionalized cruelty, so he’s not really responding to the current moment. I’d also argue against the premise that Anderson astutely anticipated the specific misery of now. Instead, the film is a resounding success because it speaks to a rot that’s long been in place inside the flagging heart of the nation. It’s not timeliness that makes the film true.

After all, Anderson based his screenplay on a novel that’s thirty-five years old. Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland was published in 1990, when the immediate hangover of the Reagan years still throbbed mercilessly. Anderson took a free hand in his adaptation but retained a enduringly pertinent base premise of bad actors in power and idealists running their opposition on a spinning wheel until exhaustion prompts surrender. In Anderson’s rendering, the embers of rebellion still glow. They just need an infusion of air to reignite.

Anderson’s opposing narrative tendencies towards discipline and wooliness play together better here than in any of his films since Boogie Nights. He somehow manages to make One Battle After Another satiric, earnest, cynical, heartrending, hilarious, shrewd, and hopeful all at the same time. Although the film is absolutely packed with plot and character, stretching past two and a half hours in runtime, it moves as fast as a cyclone. There’s not a wasted moment, and it’s genuinely remarkable under the circumstances how often Anderson delivers a key plot point with ruthless economy. Meeting the director’s level, every one of Anderson’s collaborators — editor Andy Jurgensen, cinematographer Michael Bauman, composer Jonny Greenwood, the incredible cast, and on and on — operates unmistakably at a dizzying peak. The film itself starts to feel like a manifestation of the concerted unity of purpose that it calls for. One Battle After Another fights the good fight.