Even if this movie weren’t considered darn good, and it is, it’s almost worth it to see a filmmaker—in this case Paul Thomas Anderson—try to shoehorn a Thomas Pynchon novel into a couple of hours. He’s tried before. You need only recall Anderson’s 2014 messy and occasionally hilarious film, Inherent Vice, to award Anderson extra points for tackling the writer again.

This time it works. Partly by stripping out a lot, but there’s enough left to keep viewers’ minds buzzing. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a one-time anarchist/revolutionary and Sean Penn as a far-right army colonel determined to bring him down. Not because Col. Lockjaw is a law-and-order man. Oh, no. His reasons are much more personal. (One very-Pynchon touch is the outlandish names.)

In his revolutionary days, Bob was partnered with Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), who ends up in witness protection, and they had a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) who is now seventeen. She lives with Bob in a remote community where he spends his days getting high. He’s been chased so relentlessly by the authorities that he and his friends have developed a sharp sense of paranoia, and when the warning signs come, Bob heeds them. At least as well as he can in his addled state. The plot has been updated from the book (feds chasing drug dealers) to today (feds chasing immigrants), and doesn’t suffer for it.

What so impresses me about DiCaprio’s work is that he’s able to set aside vanity and just be the character, rough edges and all. So many actors (male and female) persist in preening for the camera. They may be delivering the lines, but you can almost see them thinking, “How do I look? How do I look?” DiCaprio lets all that go. And Sean Penn? Creepy, creepy. Plus Benicio del Toro as a guy who knows how to get things done.

Surprisingly (it is Pynchon, after all), the story is pretty easy to follow, and while there’s some violence, Anderson doesn’t follow the Hollywood rule of maximum-to-the-ridiculous fire-power. Some of the strongest scenes are the quietist. It’s a story about people on the fringes, and many kinds of unraveling (security) blankets are out there. I won’t give away any of the plot. See it, and decide for yourself.

Nice music choices too, though I’ll never hear the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” the same way again. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 95%; audiences 85%.