★★★ (3 out of 4)
If you get past the flap over Sydney Sweeney and her jeans/genes ad, you’ll find the “White Lotus” and “Euphoria” Emmy nominee at the top of her game in “Americana,” now in theaters where this outrageously off-the-wall love story shapes up as a hoot and a half.
Sweeney plays Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress at a nowhere diner in South Dakota who wants to live the American Dream, which in her case translates into making it big as a country singer and actress despite a distinct stutter and a noticeable lack of talent.
Penny Jo attracts the attention of brain-injured military veteran Lefty Ledbetter, played by the reliably terrific Paul Walter Hauser with just the right delusional notes of lovesick and loopy. In this feature writer-director debut for Tony Tost, you wind up rooting for characters others would ignore. Tost admits his influences—Tarantino, the Coen brothers, the Steven Spielberg of “The Sugarland Express”—but he absorbs them and finds his own way. He calls “Americana” a “beer-and-popcorn movie with pretensions.” Fair enough.
Poised between hilarity and heartbreak, 'Americana' sticks with you.
It’s Penny Jo who discovers the details of an upcoming heist job involving Lefty, Roy Lee Dean (former porn star Simon Rex) and two accomplices, hitman Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane) and Fun Dave (Joe Adler), to steal a rare Lakota Ghost Shirt, a sacred Native American artifact said to be worth a million or at least half of one. Ghost Eye (a standout Zahn McClarnon), a Native freedom fighter, also wants the shirt, said to protect its wearer from bullets and worse.
Like the current “Weapons,” “Americana” is an anthology film in which we’re introduced to different characters in five chapters until Tost finds the right time to tie them together. Those who caught “Americana” two years ago at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW to insiders) have been wondering when this lost gem would open. The time is now.
Tost, who says he’s dedicated to shedding light on overlooked parts of the American West, deserves credit for getting the atmosphere exactly right with a style allergic to the usual Hollywood slickness. He draws uniformly fine performances from a large cast. I’d give any prize for acting newcomer to the “Closer” singer-songwriter Halsey, who shows the same feisty flair she brings to her music. You can’t take your eyes off her.
Like A$AP Rocky in “Highest 2 Lowest,” singers are killing it on the thespian scene. Halsey plays Mandy Starr, a Joan Jett lookalike who hates her hothead older lover Dillon. Her little brother Cal (a very funny Gavin Maddox Bergman) is another handful since the kid wears a Native headband, carries a bow and arrow and truly believes he’s the reincarnation of Chief Sitting Bull. No wonder Mandy escapes in Dillon’s car with the ghost shirt in the trunk.
It was during the music video shoot for Halsey’s 2019 hit “Graveyard” that she and Sweeney met and connected as friends and future collaborators. It’s a kick to see this kind of fresh talent come together to bring Tost’s tall tale to such vibrant life on screen.
“Americana” hits its inflection point at Mandy’s childhood home from hell, now a cult compound run by her Christian fundamentalist father (Christopher Kriesa) who forced his daughters to wear prairie dresses and then sold them off in a white slavery operation. The Waltons, the Starrs are not.
The result is a mesmerizing modern western with its boots still in the Old West. There’s a palpable excitement, shot through with moments of surprising tenderness, especially in the relationship between Lefty and Penny Jo that Hauser and Sweeney—cast against type—played to an unpolished perfection. Poised between hilarity and heartbreak, “Americana” sticks with you.