AbstractWe study a one-dimensional Lagrangian problem including the variational reformulation, derived in a recent work of Ambrosio–Baradat–Brenier, of the discrete Monge–Ampère gravitational model, which describes the motion of interacting particles whose dynamics is ruled by the optimal transport problem. The more general action-type functional we consider contains a discontinuous potential term related to the descending slope of the opposite squared distance function from a generic discrete set in $$\mathbb {R}^{d}$$ R d . We exploit the underlying geometrical structure provided by the associated Voronoi decomposition of the space to obtain $$C^{1,1}$$ C 1 , 1 -regularity for local minimizers out of a finite number of shock times.