Directed By Tony Tost

Starring – Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey

The Plot – When a rare Lakota Ghost Shirt falls onto the black market in a small South Dakota town, the lives of local outsiders and outcasts violently intertwine. Some seek fortune and some seek personal freedom, while others simply want to return the artifact to its proper tribal home.

Rated R for violence, adult language throughout and some sexual references.

Americana (2025) Official Trailer – Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey

POSITIVES

For his feature length directorial debut, Tony Tost cruises through the same highways and byways that the Coen Brothers paved in their 1996 breakthrough hit, “Fargo”, with much of the movie centering around the impulses of a bunch characters inside of small town, each with their own objective Mcguffin to attain, in order to seek respective fresh starts between them. While this intention carries with it some difficulties of its own in connecting to an audience, Tost’s direction continuously rises to the occasion in tapping into the simplicities of these characters made complex by their dreams of a grander lifestyle, and though money is already the universal motivator in getting people to explore drastic measures that they otherwise wouldn’t commit, the shirt itself carries such a cultural significance to endangered Native American tribes that surround the distinguished setting, allowing the script (Also from Tost) to tap vividly into thematic aspects pertaining to everything from Patriarchal households, to cultural appropriation, to even personal redemption that binds so many of these strange characters together, taking the audience on an unforeseen road of exploration that can, for better or worse, be summarized as being unpredictable to the expectations of the audience. This forces the film’s tone to take on challenging waters that combine silly humor with audacious crime, and as to where this would feel like a tough juggle for inexperienced directors, Tost maintains the underlining in ways that don’t sacrifice one over the other, instead effectively registering some meticulously timed gags and jaw-dropping instances of breathtaking violence that effectively register a jolting impact, on account of some riveting sound designs that audibly make the bullets feel as close and intense in ways like we’re standing next to the characters who they were intended for. On top of this, the film is enhanced by some gorgeous landscape shots in the cinematography from Nigel Bluck, that seamlessly contextualize not only the isolation factors of the intended South Dakota setting, but also ironically articulates the versatility of its many cultures under such a condensed jurisdiction, allowing it to convey Western sensibilities to a genre helming that it wants so evidently to be classified as. This leads to a riveting third act climax that quite honestly nearly saved the movie for me, despite an opening hour that left me conflicted by the growing hinderances in attempting to connect to such an unengaging story. As you might expect from the setup, this is the moment when the road of inevitability between our characters comes to a connective merger, resulting not only in several pocketed dynamics between a legion of characters that keeps us maintained to the development of the stakes, but also finally some engaging interaction between its decorated ensemble, whom have otherwise been separated from one another for a majority of the film’s 102-minute duration. Because Tost takes his time resolving every individualized arc in the confines and permanency of continuous gunfire and whizzing arrows, it leads to a satisfying climax that at least resolved the film on the highest level of momentum that it was able to tap into for itself, in turn making the full realization of the intention feel like the inferior film surrounding its efforts was built around it, from the ground up. Last but not least, the performances are admittedly a mixed bag, however the movie undeniably serves as a vehicle for Halsey’s efforts as a dramatic actress, allowing the emotional range and personality that she deposits consistently to her character feel like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise bounty of blandness. Tost even seems aware of this reality, as despite starting as one of the film’s many supporting characters, she takes a bit of charge by the midway point of the movie, awarding her not only with more opportunistic screen time throughout the movie’s aforementioned climax, but also more outlined empathy for her character, which allowed her to be the only one amongst them that I was faithfully invested in.

NEGATIVES

This is one of those movies that requires a particular level of investment to get across the finish line unscathed, and while Tost and his production team does have quite a lot going for it, beneficially, it frequently feels conflicted by the air of its own scatterbrained execution, beginning especially with the non-linear framing device that unnecessarily divides these overstuffed character arcs and ever-increasing subplots into individualized chapters, against the will of the movie’s pacing. This is the second film in as many weeks to attempt such an unorthodox means of storytelling, and while it worked almost seamlessly for a movie like “Weapons”, which constantly ratcheted the tension and uncertainty of its characters before each transition to another character, here it just feels like a way for Tost to be artistically pretentious, with nothing in the way of effective intention or mounting suspense that has the audience yearning for the next chapter. It’s difficult enough that this movie starts out on the fourth of five chapters, before then deviating to them in sequential order, as a desire to lure the audience in immediately with one of its most impactful scenes, but it’s even worse that it takes so long for the Ghost shirt to properly materialize, in order to enact the stakes and conflicts of the plot, and while I do appreciate any movie that takes ample time articulating its environment and its characters, a movie with an opening act as dull as this one condemned it almost entirely upon arrival, initiating an uphill climb of a second act that certainly has its work cut out for it. The characters are also blandly uninteresting in their respective outlines and collective portrayals, with Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser being the human portrayal of paint drying on a hot Summer day. I am not someone who takes it out on actors or actresses for their poor choices off-screen, but Sweeney doesn’t have the jeans or genes to be even accidentally appealing here, and considering she’s given a stutter to further complicate connectivity to her ambitions and adversity, it’s an arduous chore in establishing the sparks between her and the bumbling Hauser, and these are who we’re left to spend a majority of the movie’s first half alongside, so you can imagine how arduously tedious the engagement becomes after it. If this isn’t enough, the dialogue intentionally attempts to illustrate the simplistic kinds of conversations inspired from such an intended setting, they lack the kind of subtlety with intention that makes it evidently telegraphed where each of them are headed, especially with the aforementioned dynamic duo of Sweeney and Hauser, who feel like two naive children who are unafraid to confront their feelings about one another. I can forgive having such a cutesy intention to appraise empathy for the characters who are so obviously destined to be with one another, but it just becomes a frustrating exercise in futility, the longer I was forced to endure their frustrating tip-toeing with one another, making me wish that they were unceremoniously disposed of off-screen, in order to get back to the more fascinating dynamics. Finally, I can’t unleash a cinematic ass-whipping without discussing the laughable layers that were the movie’s hair and make-up work, but specifically the lifeless, volume-less wigs distributed to Sydney Sweeney and Halsey’s character appearances, which constantly distracted and detracted my already frail investment to the picture. The longer that you’re forced to look at their lack of movement or artificial coloring, the more you’re forced to come to terms that some poor animal died in the process of attaining something so visually jarring, and while I don’t consider myself half as much of a snob with make-up, hairstyling, and costumes, as I am towards Cinematography or sound, I’m also not blind enough to believe for a single solitary second that either of their hair legitimately belonged to the roots of the actresses, feeling like they belong in a dress-up episode of a teenage sitcom, instead of a feature length cinematic crime drama.

OVERALL
“Americana” is a monotonously sluggish country-fried neo-noir that fails to exceed the expectations of such a derivatively uninspiring outline that borders somewhere between Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and the Coen Brothers “Fargo”, without even half of the compelling characters or conflicts to drive to a nearly two hour runtime. While Tost does elicit an all-bets-are-off kind of scintillating climax that at least attains some of the promise in such a concept, this conquest of the American dream takes far too many detours in the object of its destination, requiring the patience of a saint to appreciate so much about so little.

My Grade: 5.6 or D+