‘Americana’ review: Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser conspire in western crime saga

Dir/scr: Tony Tost. US. 2024. 107mins.

With nods to Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, writer/director Tony Tost’s debut feature follows a series of disparate characters in South Dakota, all in pursuit of a priceless Native American artefact. But even though the western crime drama Americana boasts a widescreen beauty, its crooks, dreamers and lost souls too often are more quirky than they are convincing, which along with the film’s intermittently compelling interlocking storylines and awkward mix of irreverence and commentary leads to an uneven saga.

Tost imagines the modern American West as a crumbling frontier

Opening August 15 in the US before arriving in the UK the following weekend, this intriguing but derivative picture could snag viewers thanks to rising stars Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser, who are joined by pop singer Halsey. Americana received strong reviews out of its premiere at the 2023 SXSW festival, but the film’s long delay has dampened buzz. Still, Tost’s role as showrunner for the popular Natasha Lyonne series Poker Face might further attract the curious.

The artefact in question is a Ghost Shirt, a symbol of power and freedom for the Indigenous Lakota people who still reside in Americana’s smalltown South Dakota community. Now owned by a private collector, the ceremonial shirt is the target of Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), a thief who hires ruthless criminal Dillon (Eric Dane) to steal it. Meanwhile, aspiring country singer Penny Jo (Sweeney), who works as a waitress at a local diner, catches wind of the heist, recruiting her bashful friend Lefty (Hauser) to help her swipe the artefact for themselves. And then there’s Mandy (Halsey), Dillon’s girlfriend with a mysterious past, who wants to be free of his abusiveness.  

Working with cinematographer Nigel Bluck, Tost imagines the modern American West as a crumbling frontier in which Indigenous people have been subjugated and few economic opportunities exist. (Zahn McClarnon does good work as Ghost Eye, the resilient, foul-mouthed leader of a Black Panther-like Native American political movement.) Americana playfully jumbles its chronology — a character who is killed early on reappears throughout much of the rest of the narrative — in such a way to draw comparisons to a similar device in Pulp Fiction. Likewise, the film’s cadre of peculiar, sometimes comic regional characters harks back to Joel and Ethan Coen’s sardonic western portraits No Country For Old Men and True Grit. 

To be sure, those comparisons are hardly fatal if well-executed, and Tost displays an enthusiasm for keeping his audience off-balance as the story, told in chapters, gradually reveals the unexpected connections between certain individuals. Despite being twist-laden, Americana takes time to develop its central characters so that we understand why the fortune this Indigenous artefact could fetch means so much to them. In the case of Penny Jo, who is self-conscious because of a debilitating stutter, the potential financial windfall means she can ditch South Dakota and move to Nashville, where she hopes to be discovered. As for Mandy, the money would buy a fresh start for herself and her son Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), who fervently believes he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. 

Cal’s odd character wrinkle underlines the picture’s principal weakness, which is its emphasis on people who are a little too colourful to be fully believable. Whether it is Lefty’s anxious habit of proposing to every woman he spends any time with or Penny Jo’s constant stutter, Americana wants to present forgotten everyday people who possess endearingly unusual traits. But Tost’s writing is not sharp enough to allow his characters to rise above their mannerisms. As much as Hauser imbues Lefty with sweetness — or Sweeney tries to make this singer more than just a stereotypical wide-eyed ingenue — Americana’s crime-thriller machinations keep undercutting the actors’ best efforts. The film’s resolution turns out to be a protracted, unsatisfying shootout that fails to rewrite or rejuvenate the genre conventions. 

Tost certainly has a feel for the terrain, both visually and musically. Empty, barren landscapes dominate, hinting at a lawless world where hidden evils lurk. (Mandy will eventually reunite with her family, resulting in one of Americana’s most striking, if not entirely persuasive, sequences.) And the soundtrack is stuffed with classic country tunes from the likes of Eddy Arnold, Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson and Tammy Wynette, which highlight the characters’ beaten-down, melancholy spirit. Americana has ideas about the lie of the American dream, the difficulties Indigenous people face maintaining their dignity in a land stolen from them, and the despondency of those who left behind by the technological age. But like Penny Jo with her stutter, sometimes the film struggles to articulate what’s on its mind.