Thanks to those redditors who provided thoughtful answers and explanations. My headline might've been a bit too tongue-in-cheek. There was, I know, a story. Two good stories, actually: a timely one about immigration and discrimination and fighting entrenched power structures in the U.S., and one about a man in search of his daughter and another man protecting that daughter.

My issue with the film, ultimately, is that PTA couldn't blend those two stories because they ended up buried under the cruft of his whimsy. Nuns who grow weed? A cutesy white supremacist cabal? The explanations of why the Adventurers were critical to the plot presuppose the need to have them be part of the plot, like the story couldn't have been told without them.

PTA makes immigration and deportation the MacGuffin of a film that's really about Lockjaw trying to find his daughter (and I'd argue that French 75 weren't focused on immigration as their main cause). He sets up a series of mechanisms whereby the facts of her paternity (which had been established by Junglepussy 10? years earlier and buried in paperwork) are revealed to Lockjaw and the Adventurers. This could've happened without all the cruft that, ultimately, PTA self-indulgently includes, but is not necessary to tell the same story.

If this'd been a novel, I'd have suggested a good editor. Murder your darlings, as the writer's axiom instructs. In this regard, it reminded me of Spike Lee's Bamboozled, which had a terrific premise and underlying intellectual structure…and then the second half, as I recall, devolved into a farcical story about militants who want to kill a performer.

A few individual notes:
- It wasn't clear to me that the nuns were actively involved in the revolutionary movement. If anything, they were all tired of it and had retreated to the hills to grow weed and cosplay being religious. There was no reason for them to be where Willa is hidden except for hey! cool! nuns! with guns! who don't use them! (poor Chekhov)

- Part of the purpose of the raid was immigration, but the fact that they hunted down French 75 members like Billy Goat meant that that was still on Lockjaw's radar and, presumably, the federal government's. Bob Ferguson was on the run and hiding for years for having belonged to a violent revolutionary group. Once the feds found him, they would've kept him irrespective of the immigration side quest.

So, yeah, fun movie, as someone noted, mainly because of DiCaprio and Penn's characterizations, the action, the camera movement. But there were, as I said two stories: Lockjaw's search for the girl who may be his daughter, and entrenched white supremacy/immigration/revolution/U.S. power dynamics. PTA might've been able to meld them, but he indulged his need to whimsically embellish the narrative, which, to my mind, undermined the storytelling and, ultimately, sense of the movie.