If ever there was a title that summed up these perma-crisis, dragging-us-back-to-the-dark-ages times, it’s One Battle After Another. Paul Thomas Anderson’s second Thomas Pynchon adaptation, following Inherent Vice, is loosely based on the author’s 1990 novel Vineland. It introduces a group of interracial American revolutionaries as they fight back across a range of fronts, before suffering the fallout from a betrayal. Aptly enough, it’s a total riot.

Things kick off in incendiary fashion as the French 75 enact a slick raid on an immigration detention centre to liberate those imprisoned there. The film later skips forward to find former gang member Leonardo DiCaprio and his daughter (played by Chase Infiniti) living under their assumed identities of Bob and Willa, before coming under threat again. An absolutely electric Teyana Taylor (A Thousand And One) plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, Willa’s firebrand mother, while Sean Penn turns in an amusingly stiff and sulky performance as the outfit’s bitter and brooding nemesis Colonel Steven J Lockjaw, who joins forces with the preposterously but somehow fittingly named white supremacists, the Christmas Adventurers. Alana Haim, Wood Harris and Regina Hall play some of the other French 75 crew, with Benicio Del Toro as Willa’s hugely helpful karate instructor.

Although it starts with sexy, boundary-breaking swagger, One Battle After Another is an ever-evolving beast with a 70s-inspired, sometimes Tarantino-esque flavour. Anderson delivers a wild, stunningly shot but almost ramshackle ride through impactful action, hapless shenanigans (involving an incompetent and increasingly dishevelled DiCaprio), which play like an anti-Taken, and merciless satire of the far-right elite whose big-screen representatives evoke Trump’s cronies. It’s grand, gritty and epically long but, most of all, it’s outrageously, nay obscenely funny. Cinema really doesn’t get much more entertaining.

One Battle After Another is in cinemas now.