On 'One Battle After Another'

The tail end of the 1980s—that decade in which a triumphant conservative coalition with an amiably senescent president as its figurehead had set about dismantling the New Deal and fundamentally reshaped American politics—was occasion for a certain amount of soul-searching on the part of those who nurtured memories, bitter and fond, of the deferred dreams of the ’60s. Two films appeared in 1988, Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty and Robert Kramer’s Doc’s Kingdom, about demobbed veterans of the militant counterculture and their tetchy relations with their children, now come of age.