“She’s a runner, you a stone.” That’s a weird thing to say to Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Pat Calhoun, in One Battle After Another, given that the first time we see him in the film, he is in motion, chasing after his fellow members of the left-wing revolutionary group French 75. But then you kind of get what his girlfriend’s mother means. Once he catches up with his team, which is about to break a bunch of people out of a detention center, it’s with a nervous energy in tow. He doesn’t know the plan. His girlfriend, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), is the real revolutionary. But him? He’s got the kind of anxious electricity that spins you in circles, keeping you on the same spot, dug in even further—in other words, a stone. “You look so lost,” the mom says, while her heavily pregnant daughter shoots a machine gun and compares herself to Tony Montana, her enormous belly sticking out of her red plaid shirt. “It’s like she doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant,” Pat says. So who’s the one who’s really lost here?
When Perfidia disappears, Pat finds himself alone with their baby—it’s their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), who gives him purpose. When Willa goes AWOL, Pat, now a paranoid ex-guerilla who spends his time smoking up and watching The Battle of Algiers in an immediately iconic faded plaid autumnal robe, splits in two. And that robe, which recalls pregnant Perfidia’s plaid, which is both loungewear and outerwear, is a nod to this dichotomy. While Pat has been hibernating, in a smoky haze of paranoid paralysis for 16 years, now he’s awake, tearing through the tunnel under his house before his past catches up with him, careening toward his kid, a stoner on the run.
