Tony Tost’s Americana arrives- a dusty jukebox in a half-lit bar—full of promise and static. It’s a film that wants to sing the ballad of a broken country, and sometimes it does. Sometimes it just hums. With a Lakota ghost shirt as its sacred MacGuffin and a cast of misfits chasing it like salvation, the movie spins its tale across South Dakota’s haunted plains, where bullets fly and history lingers like smoke. The film is a crime drama, a modern western, and a critique of American greed, stitched together with ambition and uneven thread.
Sydney Sweeney’s Penny Jo Poplin is a waitress with a stammer and a dream. Th3e stammer feels like a screenwriter’s idea of depth. Sweeney’s presence is undeniable. She glows in the role, even when the dialogue falters. Her chemistry with Paul Walter Hauser’s Lefty—an earnest romantic with a recycled proposal—is sweet, strange, and believable. Their subplot, tangled in diner booths and bad decisions, gives the film its heart, even if that heart beats irregularly.
The ghost shirt is said to protect its wearer from white men’s bullets, but it is never worn. That’s the joke, and the tragedy. It’s a relic of resistance, passed around like contraband, never honored. Tost uses it to thread a nonlinear tale of theft, escape, and reckoning. The shirt becomes a symbol of what America refuses to confront: its history with Native peoples, its obsession with ownership, its inability to protect what’s sacred. The title Americana is not a celebration—it’s a dare.
Halsey’s Mandy Starr is a single mother with a punch and a plan. Her escape from Dillon (Eric Dane, all menace and sweat) kicks off the film’s chaos. Her son Cal, played by Gavin Maddox Bergman, believes he’s Sitting Bull reincarnated. It’s a detail that feels both poetic and forced— a child trying to rewrite his lineage with crayons. Zahn McClarnon’s Ghost Eye, a Marx-reading militant, grounds the film with gravitas. He’s the only character who understands the stakes beyond the loot.
Tost’s direction is confident, even when the tone wobbles. He frames the landscape with reverence, letting the emptiness speak. The South Dakota setting (shot in New Mexico) becomes a character itself—wide, wounded, waiting. The film’s structure borrows from Tarantino and the Coens, but the rhythm isn’t always right. Dialogue that aims for cleverness sometimes lands as clunky. Still, there’s a pulse beneath the posturing, a yearning to say something true.
As a crime drama, Americana is more mood than mystery. The heist is convoluted, the climax chaotic, but the journey is peppered with moments of strange beauty. A bow and arrow in a gunfight. A Marxist in a pickup truck. A waitress who wants to sing. These are the fragments that linger. The film doesn’t resolve so much as unravel, and maybe that’s the point. America, after all, is a story still being rewritten.
The acting is a mixed bag, but mostly in tune with the film’s themes. Sweeney struggles with the stammer but shines in silence. Hauser brings warmth to a role that could’ve been cartoonish. McClarnon is magnetic. Halsey surprises. Bergman’s Cal is the weakest link, more concept than character. Still, the ensemble holds together. There a band playing a half-remembered tune.
The plot succeeds in ambition but falters in execution. The ghost shirt is a brilliant device, but its journey is muddled. The nonlinear structure adds intrigue but sacrifices clarity. Yet the film’s thematic core—greed, erasure, survival—remains intact. Tost doesn’t offer answers, only echoes. That’s not failure. That’s form.
Americana works best as a collage of contradictions. It’s hit and miss, but the hits sting. It critiques modern America not with lectures, but with longing. It honors Native history not with solemnity, but with presence. It’s a film that wants to matter, and sometimes it does. Sometimes it just wanders.
Grade: B+.
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