My juicehead neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were debating the merits of the Academy Award-winning One Battle After Another.

“It’s what they call a tour de force,” I said. “A satire, a black comedy, a political statement, an action movie, a love story. One of those rare movies — serious and funny as hell at the same time.”

Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “I guess so, but them machine guns gave me a headache. and I couldn’t figure out what time it was — the 2000s and then the present, I think, but most of that revolutionary bank-robbing stuff happened in the 1970s and ’80s. There weren’t no Weathermen left in the aughts.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s called poetic license — fudging the facts to make your story more compelling without making it less truthful. The sort of storytelling that’s as old as the works of Homer, whoever he was.”

I told him that burned-out rebels like Bob Ferguson, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, and cartoonish villains like Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw, the Sean Penn character, will keep facing off so long as satiric movies are being made about democracy under threat from authoritarian forces.

“That’s why Paul Thomas Anderson called his movie One Battle After Another,” I said. “The same pitched battles get fought every generation. The bathrobe DiCaprio wore is like the bathrobe Jeff Bridges wore in The Big Lebowski.”

Swamp Rabbit zipped open a beer. “Well, ain’t you the wise one — a movie critic and historian both. I watch movies to be entertained, Odd Man. I don’t need no history lesson.”

He was playing devil’s advocate by implying that One Battle After Another is just an exercise in leftwing revisionist history. “You’re not fooling me,” I said. “I know you liked the movie.”

I mentioned the sex scene between the racist Penn character and the Black outlaw played by Teyana Taylor. And the long scene with Jonny Greenwood’s atonal piano music playing while DiCaprio is on the run. And the car chase. And the outlaws using a secret code that starts with “Green Acres, the Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction” — a reference to Gil Scott-Heron’s serio-comic rap poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

The movie is very loosely based on Vineland, a Thomas Pynchon novel, but Scott-Heron’s rap is a much larger influence. Anderson, like Scott-Heron, has a knack for using the flotsam of American pop culture to shed light on contemporary societal trends.

“But most peeps are too young to recognize the stuff in that revolution song,” Swamp Rabbit said.

“No big deal,” I replied. “The flotsam these days looks pretty much like it did then. Only the names change.”