Amidst several weeks of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans commercial kicking off one of the stupidest culture wars in recent memory, she’s now starring in a movie. The movie was shot three years ago, Sweeney is merely part of the ensemble, and she delivers nothing that resembles a star performance.
The film is Americana, the feature directorial debut of the writer-director Tony Tost, who’s best known from TV; he was the showrunner of the recent second season of Poker Face. Part Coen homage, and part Tarantino, it’s a crime drama, featuring different elements, some more effective than others. It’s told in five chapters, although it’s mostly chronological with one exception. The film was shot in 2022, debuted at South by Southwest in the spring of 2023, and is finally landing in theaters now.
Sweeney plays Penny Joy, a small-town diner waitress who struggles with a stammer but dreams of country music stardom. The ubiquitous Paul Walter Hauser is Lefty, a handyman who suffered a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan and is prone to serially asking women to marry him.
The two of them are seeking a MacGuffin called a “Ghost Shirt,” a valuable American Indian artifact that’s of great interest to all the characters, for either cultural or monetary reasons. This results in sudden bloodshed, delivered with various implements. Tony Huss, in an amusing single-scene performance, has the shirt. A shady collector of Western artifacts (Simon Rex) wants it, with the help of a group of small-time henchmen, led by Sweeney’s Euphoria co-star Eric Dane.
There’s also Dane’s girlfriend (singer Halsey), whose young son (Gavin Maddox Bergman) believes he’s the living reincarnation of Sitting Bull. This puts him at odds with a militant gang of Lakota American Indians, led by Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), who are after the shirt as well, and aren’t sympathetic to his Sitting Bull claim.
These are some strong actors, and they deliver, especially McClarnon, a character I’d prefer to watch an entire film about, than the movie Americana is. Dane and Rex are actors from a long time ago who’ve popped up lately in crime films. Halsey, better known as a singer than an actress, holds her own in a plot that goes in a direction you would never guess.
Sweeney and Hauser are the biggest names in the cast, but their arc is the least compelling, and not only because the plot forgets about them for long stretches. What’s the big idea here? I guess it’s a story set against the backdrop of American history and myth, but despite some decent elements, it doesn’t add up.