Director: Tony Tost
Writer: Tony Tost
Stars: Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey, Simon Rex
Synopsis: The lives of local outsiders and outcasts violently intertwine when a rare Lakota Ghost shirt falls onto the black market in a small South Dakota town.
There are films that I walk into with zero expectations. Zero anticipation. The result is usually better than expected and refreshing, especially in a lukewarm year for film with more misses than hits. Americana, like the 2023 brilliant The Last Stop in Yuma County and the Coen Brothers-esque LaRoy, Texas, is a love letter to the American West. It has all the thriving elements of a good neo-Western. Multiple characters with complex arcs and dynamics, an interconnected storyline, a quest object, and multiple loopholes. Does it deliver on what it promises, though? The answer is more complicated than that.
The story goes as follows, a prized artifact is unintentionally driven across town, with every character wanting to get their hands on it for varying reasons. Unfortunately characters are not well developed enough to have separate reasons from one another for desperately wanting to snatch this prized possession. This lack of character development results in the audience members losing interest quickly in their fates. Anyway, the Lakota Indian ghost shirt gets stolen by two boring, pointless criminals, led by Eric Dane (great, predictable performance) and things further escalates when his abused wife (Halsey), knocks him out and flees with the prized shirt, escalating a chain of violence, getting rid of the film’s awful characters one by one, and some cool action sequences that save what might’ve been a very stagnant narrative pace.
One of the key notes in Americana is performances. Sydney Sweeney rarely fails to deliver, but with her stutter and demure personality here, it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes every time she’s on screen. Admittedly, Sweeney has more than one instance where she has shed her stunning, larger-than-life movie star aura that allows her to shine in more risqué roles such as Euphoria and Anyone But You, and chosen a more stripped-down, raw-faced screen presence in both Reality and Immaculate. In both roles, she succeeded immensely. But not here. Her performance is strained and unlikely. Her stuttering waitress is a camouflage for her star persona to try and prove her strength beyond her status as one of the hottest female movie stars of our time. On the other hand, Paul Walter Hauser miserably fails as Lefty Ledbetter to bring anything new to the table. Their scenes together not only lack chemistry, but also intrigue.
This feature’s surprising screen presence is Halsey. As Mandy she’s a scene stealer, with her punk rock persona and her swaggering suave, she commands every scene she is in, promising a fleshed out actress to be used and molded into future interesting roles with more veteran filmmakers. She has already worked with Ti West in MaXXXine and showcased brilliant physicality and emotional depth in the visual companion to her album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, so it will be interesting to keep a track of her future acting choices. The rest of the cast give mellow performances, serving the purpose of the tale but never going beyond a one-dimensional note.
It’s harsh to call a film forgettable, but Americana may belong to this down-on-its-luck category. An enjoyable watch with a solid premise, but nothing too exciting to stick in the mind long after walking away from the movie theater. It’s writer-director Tony Tost feature debut and to be fair, it is still a promising vehicle for future directorial projects from him. That is one of the core problems of modern cinema. Even purified action flicks of bygone eras have their memorable moments that hardcore fans regurgitate and suck on till this day. But hundreds of movies come and go in recent years without leaving an impact, not even a movie star’s beaming smile on the big screen.
