When Smoke Signals arrived in U.S. theaters on the eve of Independence Day, 1998, few could anticipate the wave of Native American art that would wash across the collective Western cultural consciousness over the following several decades. Prior to this, movie audiences were either offered the harmful, colonialist stereotype of Native Americans that permeated Hollywood’s golden age of Westerns and has been explicated in thorough, carefully considered long-form elsewhere, or… nothing. Other forms of art delivered meaningful representation earlier than did cinema — N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for instance, set Native American literature on an accelerated pace toward relative widespread consumption, though moviegoing was by this point the more popular, less academic narrative medium of choice for the public — but it still took nearly half a century before a sustained, independent-minded effort was made to platform Indigenous voices in the motion picture industry.
Writer (and occasional filmmaker) Sherman Alexie has receded into the background of this renaissance — and as of 2025, all artistic life — after sexual harassment accusations were leveled in 2018, and yet it’s tough to understate how essential his work was in moving Indigenous representation into the present day. His writing wrestles with ideas surrounding Native American contemporaneity, and the psychological dichotomies that can arise when false tropes of either historical and media inception are internalized. Smoke Signals was adapted by Alexie himself from his book of interconnected short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and his sensibilities and preoccupations were a tidy fit with the film’s director, Chris Eyre, who noted in an interview with The New York Times: “The only thing you get in making period pieces about Indians is guilt. I’m interested in doing what non-Indian filmmakers can’t do, which is portray contemporary Indians.” This ideological shift with regard to Native representation was not only critical to Smoke Signals’ immediate and lasting impact, but goes a long way in anticipating the explosion of Native American, First Nations, and Métis voices in 21st century art.
Which brings us to Cody Lightning’s meta not-sequel to Smoke Signals, Hey Viktor!, a tongue-in-cheek, mockumentarian meditation on everything from child stardom to the entertainment industry’s fickle relationship with Native art to substance abuse to pretendianism to the destructive cycle that arises when chasing the shadow of past glory. It also features more deep buttcrack shots than probably any film you’ve viewed outside of an incognito browser. But more than a mere showcase for Lightning’s rump, Hey Viktor! is a zoomed-in portrait of this new Native artistic moment. Lightning co-starred as the young Victor (the title’s misspelling a joke about not having rights to the name, and a reference to the original’s catchphrase) to Adam Beach’s adult main character in Smoke Signals, and in his directorial debut, he delivers a self-excoriating takedown of a fictional version of himself. In real life, Lightning has enjoyed a sporadic but sustained career since Smoke Signals — notably starring in Sterlin Harjo’s Sundance-winning debut feature Four Sheets to the Wind and working on Marvel’s Echo TV series, amongst other supporting parts — but in Hey Viktor!, Lightning is hard-drinking and desperate to reclaim relevance at any cost. The logical solution? A sequel to Smoke Signals, which to his mind has become something of a holy text to Native audiences. With the help of his manager/best friend Kate (Hannah Cheesman) — who claims Indigenous ancestry, despite being as blond-haired and blue-eyed as they come — and funding from an unhinged German (Phil Burke) who makes returning the original cast a demand of his financing, Lightning sets out to do the impossible.
And fucks up. Or, more precisely, gets fucked up. On night one of having money in-hand for the project, Cody blows a wad on booze, drugs, and games of chance at the casino, before needing to have Kate clean his shit-covered, cheeks-spread ass with a hose-as-bidet the next morning. Arriving approximately a third of the way through the film, this sequence crystallizes the register that Lightning will be working in for its remainder. This style of maximalist juvenalia is wrung from Cody’s self-centered manchild throughout, whether in the form of gross-out and flaccid dick gags or in immature interpersonal reckonings, but the tenor of gaucheness also gives way to bone-dry deadpan on a consistent basis. The latter is more successful from a comedic standpoint; we’ve all seen the broad skewering of goon-brained narcissists before, but it’s in truth far funnier for a line like “sometimes she’s crazy all the time” to almost sneak by without notice, or for Cody to wield the insult “stinky-dink” in a genuinely rage-filled rant.
Obvious and low-brow though the humor may be, it’s at least executed with confidence and works to couch each new scene within the threat of coming off-balance in amusing ways. But what’s less successful is Hey Viktor!’s bid at satire, and its limp attempts at fleshing out the film’s discursive scaffolding. Everything remains frustratingly surface-level, burdened by the broadness of Lightning’s fictionalized self and consequently enveloping all potentially thorny rhetorical avenues within the wacky levity of the film’s tonal currency, which only serves to short circuit more substantive considerations the director attempts to weave throughout. Also damning is how jarringly flip-switch quickly the film’s redemption arc arrives, seemingly introduced and achieved in the span of a single cut. That’s not to discount wholesale that more genuinely provocative tendrils of thinking flit about scenes and remain just visible on the periphery of the proceedings, but leaving so much rich material to the realm of the implied rather than meaningfully interrogated is a disservice to what’s a pretty enticing concept on paper. By all means, still come for the laughs and the sheer lack of vanity that charges Lightning’s performance. Just don’t expect things to dig much deeper than buttcrack depth.
DIRECTOR: Cody Lightning; CAST: Cody Lightning, Hannah Cheesman, Simon R. Baker, Adam Beach; DISTRIBUTOR: Monument Releasing; IN THEATERS: July 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
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