During a raid where a large number of people in an immigrant detention centre are freed Perfidia humiliates the CO, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and he becomes sexually obsessed with her. Lockjaw begins to co-ordinate the hunt for the French 75 as a pretext to get to her, specifically.
When Perfidia gives birth to a daughter Pat tries to settle down and this is when things between them start to disintegrate. A bank robbery goes wrong and Pat is left literally left holding the baby, on the run under a false identity.
Now, sixteen years later Pat is a washed up, out of shape middle aged guy with a headstrong daughter (Chase Infiniti) who doesn't believe in any of his paranoid ramblings.
Colonel Lockjaw comes for them.
Paul Thomas Anderson mixes very 70s imagery (Ham Radio, public telephones) and borders on Blaxploitation (one of the characters is called Junglepussy, a heavily pregnant Perfidia fires an assault rifle while screaming with joy) with current issues related to the US mass deportation/ICE raids, adds comedy courtesy of the shambolic stoner Pat and then makes two thirds of the movie a chase/escape sequence. Colonel Lockjaw is a weird veiny turtle of a man reminiscent of RFK Jr. whose thirst for Perfidia is unquenchable and incompatible with everything else in his belief system, making him go totally off the rails.
It's a tribute to everybody involved how well all these slightly incongruous things go together and make for a very urgent movie even when it pauses somewhere. There's a constant feeling of helpless rush to escape from Lockjaw and the past that requires its embrace and acknowledgement.
The odd narrative thing didn't quite follow for me then the hyperreal excess of the French 75 scenes and bits that look like documentary/news footage as Lockjaw's men converge on the town are strange bedfellows just like Perfidia and Pat. Despite all this it's an unconventional and gripping tale of a world a few steps to the left of ours that could be some other past or some other future.
I'm not sure it says anything but it's certainly intense while it's playing 8/10.