Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another feels like a bridge: a sprawling detour from the more white-centric San Fernando Valley of Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza into a California refracted through militants, cultists and rogues. The ‘Christmas Adventures Club,’ a fascist Father Christmas worshipping cabal and a vile flipside to Anderson’s more innocent Valley eccentrics. The clandestine white supremacists operate behind the scenes while the militants – , including the magnificently named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), strutting through the opening and devouring the frame – give the film its narrative drive and character.

Sean Penn, meanwhile, offers a pouty, preening, shamelessly hammy turn as Colonel Lockjaw. He fits right into Anderson’s roster of grotesques, mixing natural menace with a little cartoon villainy. Leonardo DiCaprio – scruffy, rag-clad, vape-dragging, and screeching in meme-ready mode – plays Bob Ferguson, a self-deprecating ex-radical fumbling through fatherhood. Benicio del Toro, as the sensei Sergio St. Carlos, carries his characteristic unspoken weight, the sort of depth you’d expect from a character pulled from a novel.

Yet for all its color and noise, the central relationships feel oddly malnourished. By the time Willa Ferguson – Perfidia’s daughter, played with staggering poise by Chase Infiniti – reads her mother’s letter, the intended emotional zenith, I wanted a lump in my throat, but it never came. With Anderson, it rarely does. I admire his characters’ eccentricities and quotability more than I ever feel them in my gut: Lancaster Dodd revving into the horizon, Reynolds Woodcock lapping his cursed omelette, Daniel Plainview drinking your milkshake.

What Anderson does deliver is spectacle. Anderson still loves his extended, meandering set-pieces: surveilling cameras, kinetic tracking shots, symphonic sequences. Jonny Greenwood’s score is violent and beautiful: classical guitar plucks against jagged piano stabs, like offensive splats of rain in a desert, punctuated by primitive percussion. The deserts and roads themselves become characters, looping back and forth and up and down in a dizzying nautical confrontation in the dry heat. Equally influential is the soundtrack and Anderson’s iconic needle drops: Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” Ella Fitzgerald’s somehow macabre “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Its musicality as much as cinema.

But what is the film saying? Anderson has never much cared for strict accuracy; his history is a prism not a record. Like Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” he embellishes and stylizes, preoccupied with a deeper vein of memory and myth. This California is Grand Theft Auto-cartoonish, a hyper magical realism, stitched together, half remembered, and told in an inebriated slurry haze. One Battle After Another left me dry eyed, but the battle was quite a journey – ecstatic, elusive and unmistakably Anderson.

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Rated R. 2h41m.