Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. When Tony Tost’s Americana, a flyover country-set crime drama built around an interconnected ensemble, premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, the film’s ostensible leading lady, Sydney Sweeney, was primarily known for being an ingénue/sexpot with a supporting role on TV’s Euphoria. But as the film languished for years, struggling to land distribution while its production company went through bankruptcy, Sweeney’s stature as a public figure has exploded. In relatively short order she headlined the word-of-mouth sensation romantic comedy Anyone But You, starred in and produced the nunsploitation film Immaculate, made a would-be prestige drama with Ron Howard, became the unofficial spokesperson for décolletage, the official spokesperson for half a dozen products and causes — including possibly eugenics if you’re buying into Internet discourse — and even got an “attagirl” from President Trump, which is probably more of a mixed blessing. Further, her principal costar, the great character actor Paul Walter Hauser, has been nearly as omnipresent of late, having shown up recently in both The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the new version of The Naked Gun. You can argue Americana is being inauspiciously dumped into theaters during the waning days of summer — and as of this writing, the film has already whiffed in semi-wide release en route to a rapidly approaching VOD date — but if ever there were a time when attention was laser focused on this cast, it’s now. That said, you can have all the favorable market factors in the world, but a dog is still a dog — and Americana has fleas.
Set in South Dakota and Wyoming, Americana reveals itself, after about an hour, to be a fairly faithful restaging of a classical Western in contemporary drag; the modicum of fun to be had with the film is in observing the way the convoluted plot machinations slowly grind into place so that we can eventually arrive at, for example, a group of 21st century women in ankle-length dresses armed with long rifles defending their homestead from a group of Native Americans packing (compound) bows and arrows. Unfortunately, getting there requires sitting through a derivative, needlessly convoluted, and performatively violent Tarantino knock-off of the sort that routinely littered the shelves of video stores in the late ‘90s. Told in chapters announced by onscreen text (something of a trend lately, following closely on the heels of Weapons and Splitsville), our story unfolds in a jumbled chronology — in a testament to how flabby the film is, events are simply repeated, without even the benefit of presenting them from a different perspective, almost as if the filmmakers don’t trust the audience to recall something that happened 30 minutes prior — that introduces us to assorted criminal types and the people they intersect with.
Initially, we’re following Mandy (Halsey), a troubled young woman with limited prospects living with Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), a young boy who she claims is her much younger brother, and her low-life boyfriend Dillon (Eric Dane). Dillon is mixed up with Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), a shady antiquities dealer who has hired him to rob and murder a wealthy collector to liberate a rare Lakota “Ghost shirt” in his possession. Catching wind of this scheme is the demure, greasy-spoon waitress and aspiring country music singer Penny Jo (Sweeney, saddled with a genuinely ill-advised attempt at a stutter and a face full of freckles) who convinces one of her diner customers, the lovelorn veteran Lefty (Hauser) that they can steal the shirt from Dillon and either ransom it back to Roy Lee or sell it themselves on the open market for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also getting in the mix is a militant Indigenous peoples collective led by Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), who learns of the Ghost shirt’s existence and has no qualms about killing people to see the artifact returned to the community from whence it came.
Written and directed by TV veteran Tost (he was the showrunner for the most recent season of Poker Face), Americana follows these self-absorbed opportunists as they scheme and double-cross one another over a plot device we’re meant to believe is valuable based entirely on assurances from the characters — to the untrained eye, it just sort of looks like a dingy garment made out of faded animal hides — leaving a bloody trail of bodies in their wake. It’s never clear why Tost felt compelled to tell this story out of order — for example, we see one of our main characters killed in the first 10 minutes, only to then show up later in the film in a storyline that takes place chronologically earlier — but it feels telling that Americana entirely abandons the conceit at around the halfway mark (ditto the chapter title cards), having wrung out whatever intrigue or tension it could have hoped to generate from the temporal confusion. Eventually, all of our storylines catch up with one another, converging upon the secluded compound of Mandy’s well-armed, religious fundamentalist family; the entire setting has a kind of Cliven Bundy/anti-government energy to it, with pronounced rapey overtones that become more overt as the film progresses.
And it’s here, in the film’s final half an hour, that Americana finally builds up an actual head of steam after haltingly advancing its assorted agendas in a series of starts, stops, and rewinds. Up to this point we’re required to spend considerable down time with characters who fail to transcend their roles as archetypes as the film really only operates in two modes: aspiring-to-be-caustic tough guy schtick and sentimentality so sticky and insincere it’ll make your teeth itch (the courtship scenes between Lefty and Penny Jo are so mawkish it’s as though the actors have been directed to convey “extreme shyness” as “mentally disabled”). But once the film permanently relocates to Mandy’s childhood home, which for textual reasons requires her to scrub her face clean of all makeup and wear a long linen dress that gives the thoroughly modern-looking pop star the appearance of a pioneer woman, you can begin to make out what Tost was going for. The Western tropes start flying in fast and furious. In addition to being surrounded by a tribe of Native Americans who prefer bow and arrow to machine guns, we get Rex’s character rolling up to the scene in a black hat accompanied by “Streets of Laredo” on the radio (contrasted by Hauser who pointedly wears the white hat), Penny Jo being gagged and sidelined as a hostage — not for nothing, but the film begins to improve immeasurably during the stretch where Sweeney isn’t allowed to speak — and Mandy and the women in her family barricading doors and windows and keeping forward advances at bay in a good old-fashioned siege. Everything is laid directly on the surface (it all plays like “I understood that reference” for Turner Classic Movies fans), but it’s a tried and true scenario for a reason and there’s something innately compelling about the warring parties trying to negotiate with one another (in good as well as bad faith) for their lives. Heroic sacrifices, betrayals, uneasy alliances, karmic comeuppances, heartfelt reunions… it’s all the stuff of Saturday morning serials, and a filmmaker would need to work extra hard to screw it up. The kindest thing one can say about Americana is that, after an interminable start, it finally develops the good sense to simply get out of its own way.
DIRECTOR: Tony Tost; CAST: Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Zahn McClarnon, Simon Rex, Halsey, Eric Dane; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: August 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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