Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest cynical broadside on American values is one of his most enjoyable films yet. Masquerading as a high-octane thriller, it delivers a satirical stealth bomb to Trumpian policies, while Leonardo DiCaprio has the time of his life inverting the role of the action hero.

In fact, in one of the film’s multiple flashes of self-referential comedy, Benicio del Toro encourages DiCaprio to jump out of the window of a speeding car by imagining himself as Tom Cruise. As well as being a Hollywood in-joke about the self-stunting superstar, it’s also a moment that sums up this whole movie: it knows action. It does action. But it’s smarter than action.

Rather than cosily introducing us to the characters and their lives at the start, Anderson throws us into the heat of battle from frame one, leaving us desperately scampering to figure out what the hell is going on, as some sort of revolutionary army led by Teyana Taylor (as the brilliantly-monickered Perfidia Beverly Hills) sets about a campaign of enormously enjoyable, far-left guerilla warfare against US anti-immigration authorities. It’s a paean to the paranoid conspiracy films of the 70s, Boogie Nights with AK47s. And just when you’ve caught up, just when you think you know where this film is going, Anderson is waiting to slap you down again: the first half-hour is merely a preface to the true story, in which old sins, guilts and fears rise to the surface like bloated bodies after a shipwreck. There will be lots of blood.

An action film with a hapless, out-of-shape slacker as its hero is far more fun to relate to than one with a ripped muscleman. As Ray Davies sang in Superman, ‘I’m too weak, I’m so thin, I’d like to fly, but I can’t even swim’. And DiCaprio embodies the everyman role with evident relish. Everyone is more capable than him: his daughter Willa, played with utter panache by the even-more-brilliantly-monickered (but this time it’s her real name) Chase Infiniti, is a kick-ass teenager with more attitude than a honey badger. The local after-school judo instructor, played by Del Toro, effortlessly runs a vast underground empire. Even the nuns with whom they seek sanctuary seem to share their time between growing crops and practising with machine guns. By comparison, DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson is a washed-up revolutionary living in a semi-conscious state of stoned paranoia. His role should be the inadvertent saviour of the day, and he can’t even manage that.

If Bob is the schlubby, lovable heart of the film, then the villain of the piece is undoubtedly Sean Penn’s outrageously over-the-top military officer, Colonel Lockjaw. Lockjaw is the incarnation of nominative determinism: a man with a back so straight he can hardly walk, and opinions so staunchly white and unbending he looks like he’s been sprayed with laundry starch. Penn’s performance links One Battle to its spiritual forebear Dr Strangelove: he is almost a walking embodiment of George C. Scott’s General Turgidson, both in appearance, satirical intent and comedy surname. And Dr Strangelove’s Cold War critique mingled with full-on action is the guiding light for P.T Anderson.

But there’s another inspiration for Lockjaw, one which is even more revealing for One Battle After Another, and that is the inexhaustible antagonist of Garth Ennis’s landmark comic-book series Preacher, Herr Starr. Like Lockjaw, Starr is a combination of hypocritical sexual perversion and comical evil. Both pursue their quarry with superhuman determination, and both get repeatedly disfigured in the process. Both are backed by shady, ultra-right-wing Christian lunatics with unlimited funds, and both end up in a showdown in the desert. In fact, One Battle After Another feels like more of an adaptation of Preacher than the TV series it inspired. It has a schlocky, comic-book vibe with an anti-authoritarian pulse that Ennis would be proud of.

If this all deconstructs, unpacks and crushes to smithereens the idea of the American hero movie, then it’s certainly doing its job, and its two-and-three-quarter-hour runtime fairly flies by. But is it having its cake and eating it? Criticising the tropes of big-budget action while still profiting from their use? Probably, but who’s complaining when it’s this much fun? Arguably the film does have a bit of flab around its belly – perhaps one battle too many after another. It would be just as thrilling at two hours, and certainly one or two of the interrogation scenes are expendable.

But set against this the joy of so many other scenes. Bob’s hair-tearing phone conversation with an over-bureaucratic representative of the revolutionary group, who insists on him getting the password right, may not be vital to the plot, but it is probably my favourite bit of the whole film. The two car chases (two!) are fantastically leisurely compared to most multi-motor conflagrations these days. Thank god there is no shot of the hero walking towards the camera while automobiles burst into flames behind him. Instead, the cars (which are, by the way, also straight out of the 70s) tool along at a steady pace, gently nudging other motorists out of the way. It doesn’t look like CGI, and it’s all the more exciting for that. The final car chase in particular is an almost hypnotic ride along a desert road that rises and falls in vertiginous elevations. It’s literally a rollercoaster ride, with a Hitchcockian sense of location mingled with suspense.

In this film that wears its influences so lightly but meaningfully, perhaps the most important eminence grise is Shakespeare. That sixteen-year gap between the violence of the early scenes and the child returning as a young adult to right the wrongs of the past evokes both The Winter’s Tale and Pericles. Willa is certainly as feisty as Marina or Perdita, and her final embrace of her father does bring an iota of the paradisal radiance that suffuses the family reconciliations in those plays. Idealism conquers all, even death. And Perfidia was her mother, who did end the minute she began.