Sydney Sweeney has good jeans in Americana. But it’s her awkward, affected stammering that’s emblematic of this Western crime comedy, de-emphasis on the latter, as Tony Tost’s feature debut puts minimal effort into being amusing.
In theaters Aug. 15, two-and-a-half years after it premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, Americana is a ’90s-era sub-Tarantino plotting is the stock and trade of this indie effort, in which Sweeney’s waitress crosses paths with a collection of naïve sweeties and nefarious ne’er-do-wells, all of whom have their eyes set on a priceless Native American artifact.
Following a playbook pioneered (and endlessly plagiarized) decades ago, it’s a sluggish and monotonous country-ified neo-noir that fails to innovate and, worse, to utilize its magnetic leading lady and her capable co-stars.
In a dusty stretch of middle-of-nowhere America, Penny Jo Poplin (Sweeney) serves diner coffee to Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), a rancher who’s practicing his proposal speech with the aid of index cards. With a neatly trimmed beard and a 10-gallon hat atop his head, Lefty is so aww-shucks earnest that Penny can’t resist humoring the man, not realizing that this isn’t the first time he’s tried to sweep a paramour off her feet with this identical routine; when he goes down on one knee before his girlfriend, it’s revealed that this is his fourth proposal of the year.
Unsurprisingly, his pitch is rejected, although a short time later at a watering hole, he fares well with Penny, who finds him kind and charming despite (or is it because of?) the fact that he has a brain injury from his Afghanistan military tours.
No matter Hauser and Sweeney’s likability, they have no chemistry, and Americana undercuts sympathy for Penny and Lefty by unnecessarily quirk-ifying them— her courtesy of a stutter that’s as unconvincing as the rest of Sweeney’s meek, big-eyed performance, and him via the revelation that, regardless of his name, Lefty is actually a righty.
Such is the cleverness of Tost’s script, which is divided into chapters (complete with cutesy titles) that focus on additional individuals destined to play a part in its tale. In a remote trailer sandwiched between expansive dirt and enormous sky, Mandy (Halsey) cares for her adolescent brother Cal (Gavin Maddox Berman), who buys a Native American headband and begins proclaiming himself the reincarnation of Sitting Bull.
This doesn’t strike Mandy or her loutish boyfriend Dillon (Eric Dane) as funny, and the same will go for audiences; from his first to last scene, Bergman’s irony-drenched character is an unfunny device—and device he most certainly is, as proven by his ensuing role in these proceedings.
After a row with Dillon, Mandy demands that Cal flee with her; when the boy refuses, she takes off alone, leaving Cal to face off against Dillon in a duel that concludes with the grown man receiving a fatal arrow to the neck.
Another POV switch (and slight rewind), and Americana conveys that prior to his demise, Dillon was hired by sleazy local museum magnate Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) to steal a “Ghost Shirt”—a garb that the Lakota believed would protect them from the white man’s bullets—from its wealthy new owner Pendleton (Toby Huss).
When Mandy bolts in Dillon’s orange muscle car, she doesn’t realize that the Ghost Shirt is in her trunk. However, Penny and Lefty do, since they’ve conspired to nab it so they can afford a trip to Nashville, where aspiring singer Penny dreams of following in the footsteps of her idols Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn.
Left alone, Cal wanders into the territory of a gang of Native American “freedom fighters” whose leader Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon) warns the kid that his Sitting Bull schtick is ill-timed cultural appropriation. McClarnon gets the film’s sole witty dialogue when he explains to Cal that his own name is inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (and Ghostface Killah, whose Wu-Tang Clan member RZA provided its soundtrack).
Otherwise, though, he and his buddies are merely pawns in a game whose machinations are heavily indebted to Pulp Fiction and its legion of imitators, except here embellished with an assortment of melancholy country ballads that turn the action one-note.
A couple of quick encounters aside, these disparate men and women spend most of Americana circling each other until, during the finale, they meet at the same place to have the least exciting gunfight imaginable.
The location of that shootout is the ancestral home of Mandy, whose dad is a sadistic puritan who keeps his wife and daughter as veritable servants and sexual slaves—for himself and whatever creeps he sees fit to pimp them out to—and whom the young woman fled years ago to live out her life as an arm-tattooed, leather jacket-wearing, spiky-haired Joan Jett impersonator. Mandy’s relatives aren’t believable as real people, yet they also aren’t quite cartoons, and that bland middle ground is where the entire film resides, preventing it from generating genuine suspense.
What’s left, then, are fine actors tasked with enlivening middling material, and they do enough to make Americana a pleasantly unremarkable affair. To a greater extent than in Reality and the forthcoming Eden, Sweeney strains to play against type as Penny, but Hauser is better as the dimly gentle and good-hearted Lefty, and McClarnon does a pleasingly jokier version of his usual stoic and intimidating routine.
Halsey is credible as the desperate and ferocious Mandy, and Rex and Dane share one good hostile stare-down that compensates for the rest of their ho-hum scenes, which feel as if they were spit out by a computer weaned on Suicide Kings, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, and the rest of their knock-off ilk, along with Western neo-noirs like Red Rock West and No Country for Old Men.
Americana coasts to a finale of underwhelming violence and rah-rah progressive triumph, with women and Native Americans getting their comeuppance against dastardly Caucasian men, but its lethargy renders any such ideas inconsequential.
So too does a post-mayhem wrap-up that drags its feet to the point of aggravation, and serves as one final reminder that, a few quirky details notwithstanding, Tots’ film is severely low on ideas and the energy that might make them worthy of note.
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