Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser Star in 'Americana,' a Stock Festival Movie

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I tend to see my new movies Thursday nights, and with Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest eschewing Thursday night screenings and the only other big release being Nobody 2, a sequel to a competently made, by-the-numbers action movie that bored me to tears, I was left with limited options. That’s when I noticed a single showing of Americana, a movie I’d never heard of before that moment, that nonetheless starred Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser.

If you’ve never been to a film festival, Americana is exactly the kind of movie that you’re guaranteed to see there: a collection of admirably ambitious artistic choices and isolatedly solid performances that nonetheless never really comes together. Some crazy thing will happen and you’ll want to give the movie credit for unpredictability, and one of the leads will have a vulgar line about it that will be sort of funny in the moment, and the audience will laugh, but it will be mostly at the expense of the script rather than in service of it.

Once, a long time ago, after I’d just finished bombing a short stand-up comedy set at a sparsely attended open mic, I went to talk to a girl who was there who said to me, “You guys are so brave, comedy must be so hard.”

I had made it look hard. Just what I was going for! In the same way, coming out of Americana, my main thought was, “Movies are so hard.”

The characters are all sort of stock characters who aren’t quite grounded enough to feel real but aren’t quite campy enough to hit a level of knowing satire or post-modern pastiche either (Bill Murray’s line from The French Dispatch, “whatever you do, just try to make it seem like you did it on purpose,” comes to mind). Nonetheless, there’s a full-on murder in the first scene.

Set in some dusty town situated ambiguously in the Mountain West (New Mexico, Oklahoma, something like that), Paul Walter Hauser plays a lovelorn regular at a coffee shop where Sydney Sweeney is a waitress. Hauser gets to wear cool cowboy clothes, with patterned shirt jackets and earthtoned plaids, while Sydney Sweeney’s character gets saddled with big fake freckles and a prominent stutter, which are just too big a handicap to naturalistic acting. It feels like a pained attempt to de-glamorize a famously hot actress to make her just believable enough as a love interest for the sad-funny fat guy who has proposed marriage to four different women that year. “I like your stammer,” he tells her. “If it wasn’t for that, you probably wouldn’t be talking to a guy like me.”

“At l-l-least your honest,” she says.

Sweeney plays Penny Jo Pop, a stuttering waitress who idolizes Dolly Parton. Hauser plays Lefty Ledbetter, the joke being that he’s actually right-handed. They are merely two players in a drama that centers around a Lakota “Ghost Shirt,” which medicine men once thought would make them impervious to bullets, now a valuable macguffin that everyone in this drama is now chasing.

Other players include a young white boy who believes he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull (Gavin Maddox Bergman); the boy’s mother, a punk-rock escapee from a survivalist compound played by the singer Halsey; the ex-survivalist’s cold-blooded criminal boyfriend, played by Erik Dane; a huckster western museum proprietor played by Simon Rex; and a Native American resistance group led by the hyper-literate Ghost Eye, played by the always great Zach McClarnon from Dark Winds (check that one out if you haven’t).

Basically every character in Americana feels just a little too curated and the plot points a little too light on logistics, such that you end up being able to sort of sense what writer/director Tony Tost was going for even as his movie never quite has enough connective tissue to make it feel organic. Ghost Eye, for instance, is a charming presence (McClarnon is so good, even in material that’s a little beneath him) who mostly makes fun of little Sitting Bull’s hackneyed idea of Native American culture. And yet his gang of modern Native Americans attacks a well-armed compound of gun-toting survivalists using only bows and arrows anyway. Okay, man, sure.

Like a lot of festival movies, Americana feels like maybe it was intended to be set in the 1970s but they didn’t have the budget, and so plot points like Young Sitting Bull being obsessed with black and white westerns and Halsey’s Patti Smith haircut and orange muscle car coexist uneasily with dropped location pins on iPhones and Ghost Eye describing the way he got his name because he really liked the movie Ghost Dog, with music by RZA. Probably it was intentional, the American West unabled to entirely outrun its past and all that, but it never achieves the desired ends. Maybe it was an inside joke to have Sydney Sweeney play the aspiring singer rather than the actual professional singer, Halsey, whose character notably does not sing.

Meawhile there’s no plot complication that can’t be solved through abrupt murder (the effect of which wears off after the fourth or fifth time). At one point Halsey says “I guess I’m in the midst of some kind of murderous rampage,” which is funny for a second because she’s speaking our reaction out loud, but mostly in a way that only draws more attention to the puppet strings.

Movies are hard!

And so Americana mostly feels like what it is: a movie shot in 2022 that hit festivals in 2023 and didn’t get around to opening in theaters until 2025. Interesting idea, some fun performances, an admirable attempt that isn’t exactly a slog but doesn’t quite hold together either. I’d be happy to see all these people in the next thing they do, as long as they don’t make Sydney Sweeney do a stutter again.

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