As the summer of 2025 enters its final days, actress Sydney Sweeney has proven to be one of the most ubiquitous figures in popular culture during that time. Over the last couple of months, she has co-starred with Julianne Moore in the Apple TV movie “Echo Valley,” put her name on both a bar soap purportedly made with her own bath water and a frozen confection at Baskin-Robbins consisting of rainbow sherbet ice cream, lemon-lime soda and Gummi Bears that is so sweet that just looking at one of them is potentially enough to inspire a case of diabetes. Recently, she appeared in ads for a jeans company that some attempted to gin up into some kind of culture war controversy in the hopes of distracting from other things going on in the world at the moment. It seems that the only thing she hasn’t done up till now is actually have a movie in theaters but that item has now been crossed off the list with “Americana,” a film which premiered at SXSW two years ago but which is only arriving now, presumably in the hopes of attracting her fan base, particularly newer members who will no doubt chuckle mightily during the scene in which a “Let’s Go Brandon” sign is prominently displayed.
Not that “Americana” is particularly political, for the most part. Instead, it is yet another crime thriller/black comedy hybrid in the mold of the works of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers that combines gory violence, quirky dialogue, references to old movies, a non-linear narrative structure and an offbeat cast, many of whom playing characters who will be bleeding profusely at some point or another. Set in a small South Dakota town, the story revolves around a Ghost Shirt, an artifact of immense symbolic power to the Indigenous Lakota people who still reside in the area. To them, the shirt is priceless but to others, in particular to sleazy antiquities dealer Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), it is worth a lot of money. And since it is currently in the hands of rich bigwig Pendleton Duvall (Toby Huss), Dean hires local thug Dillon (Eric Dane) to steal it, which he does in the middle of a discussion salon at Dean’s house that turns into a bloodbath.
As it turns out, there are a number of other people out there who are also very interested in the shirt for their own reasons. One of them is Mandy (Halsey), who sees the shirt as her ticket to a new life, even though it will force her to confront a particularly dark aspect of her own past along the way. Another is Penny Jo (Sweeney), a waitress at the local diner who, despite a constant stammer, has dreams of making it big as a country singer—having gotten wind of the upcoming theft herself, she convinces regular customer Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser), a simple salt-of-the-earth type, to help her steal it for themselves so that she can use the proceeds to head to Nashville.
Also in the hunt is Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), the leader of a local Native American resistance movement that is determined to get back the shirt by any means necessary and who are aided by Mandy’s young son Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), whose obsession with all things Native American is now so pronounced that he proclaims to everyone that he is, in fact, the reincarnation of no less a figure than Sitting Bull, though he is advised on more than one occasion that he should probably not broadcast that too loudly. Broken up into five separate chapters, the film bounces back and forth between these characters and the various scrapes they get into before all the storylines converge in an extended final bloodbath that includes one person’s corpse being left on the side of the road with a six-pack of PBR next to them, which I believe is literally the definition of the phrase “adding insult to injury.”
“Americana” marks the feature debut of writer-director Tony Tost, who is also one of the people behind the series “Poker Face,” and while it is certainly ambitious enough in the broad strokes, none of it quite comes together. The screenplay offers up the occasional bit of snappy dialogue (I liked it when one of the Lakota referred to Cal as “Baby Billy Jack”) but the numerous twists and turns feel more like contrivances than anything else (especially when we learn the secrets of Mandy’s twisted past) and whatever cleverness there is pretty much dissipates in the final stretch as the whole thing devolves into an elongated shootout. The characters are also just a little too colorful for their own good—traits like Penny Jo’s stammer and Lefty’s odd tendency to propose marriage to a woman after only a couple of dates (which can only be partially explained by the fact that he suffers from a brain injury caused by an IED explosion in Kabul) feel more like gimmicks that plausible character traits.
The film is blessed with a fairly strong cast and while it isn’t nearly enough to make it succeed as a whole, whatever degree that certain scenes do work are almost entirely due to their efforts. Sweeney and Hauser (who, between this and his appearances in “The Naked Gun” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” has been almost as ubiquitous as Sweeney) are both undeniably gifted performers, and they have a couple of scenes early on where they have such an easy and natural rapport that it is a shame that it kind of gets pushed to the side in favor of the crime story mechanics. Also doing some impressive work is pop star Halsey, who has gradually branched out into acting in venues ranging from a shot hosting “SNL” to appearing as an ill-fated porn star in “MaXXXine” and who, based on her performance here, could plausibly forego her day job and pursue it further if she wanted.
For the most part, however, “Americana” is a mess—a good-looking mess, to be sure, but a mess, nonetheless. If you are looking for a quirky crime thriller set in the southwest, may I instead point you in the direction of “The Last Stop in Yuma County,” which contains just as many bizarro plot twists and violent showdowns as this film but deploys them with more wit and style. If you are a new member of Sydney Sweeney’s fan base who has been spurred on by the aforementioned recent controversies to find something of hers to watch, may I suggest that you gather the entire family around the television and begin catching up on “Euphoria” instead.
