Sydney Sweeney has been everywhere this summer. You could turn on your television or open your phone or walk past a bus stop and there she was again, smiling out from a commercial or a poster or a billboard. She shared the screen with Julianne Moore in Echo Valley for Apple TV. She put her name on a cheeky bar soap that sparked more tweets than a normal product ever would. She even showed up at Baskin Robbins with a dessert so sweet you felt like your dentist should be standing right there to scold you. Then came the denim ads that some people tried to whip into a culture war moment because outrage never sleeps. The only missing piece, oddly enough, was a new movie in theaters.
That gap closes with Americana. The film premiered at South by Southwest two years back and then disappeared into the tall grass for a while. Now it drops at the exact moment when Sweeney’s star is strongest and companies realize that attaching her face to anything is an instant attention machine. The timing is no accident. A gag in the film even flashes a sign that will stir a grin from that online crowd who treat politics like fantasy football. You can guess the phrase. It is a wink rather than a plot point.
Despite that little nod, this is not a political movie in any focused way. Americana is a crime story with a dark grin. It wants to sit on the same shelf as the masters of this flavor. You know the touchstones. Sharp and sassy exchanges. Bursts of grotesque violence. A nonlinear shuffle through time. Characters who walk into frame already bleeding or about to be. The people behind the movie have seen a lot of pulpy classics and would love to buy you a drink and talk about them. They are eager for you to clock the references too.
The setting is a small South Dakota town that looks like it has one good diner, one bad bar, and a half dozen people who know too much about one another. What everyone wants is a relic called a Ghost Shirt, an object with deep meaning to the Lakota who still live in the region. For them it is not a prop. It carries memory and belief. That holiness is the reason everyone else wants to steal it. The ugliness starts right there.
The shirt has ended up in the possession of a local man with money named Pendleton Duvall. He is the type of guy who buys what others cannot afford and keeps those treasures in his house like trophies. This attracts the gaze of Roy Lee Dean, an antiquities dealer drawn with an oily grin. He hires a local heavy, Dillon, to grab the shirt during a gathering at the Duvall home. The job gets loud. The floor gets slick. The movie uses that first convulsion of blood as a statement of purpose. Welcome to the party.
From there the story splinters into a set of five chapters that spin the camera around to different players. Everyone has their reason for chasing the shirt. Everyone has their private agenda. One storyline follows Mandy, played by Halsey. She sees the artifact as a way to change her life and she is willing to take risks that will bring her face to face with parts of her past she would rather not see again. The script wants those pages to sting. Sometimes they do. Sometimes you can hear the machinery.
Another thread belongs to Penny Jo, a waitress with Nashville on her mind. Sweeney gives her a shaky voice and a stammer that comes and goes like a nervous tide. Penny Jo sings in private and plans in secret. She coaxes a gentle regular named Lefty into helping her with a plan to grab the prize for themselves. Lefty is played by Paul Walter Hauser, who does that remarkable thing he does where his eyes tell you three emotions at once. His character is simple in the old fashioned way. Good manners. Quick to hold doors. Unlucky in the way life sometimes punishes decent men. We are told he got hurt by an explosion in Kabul. We see him propose almost instantly to the women he dates. It reads as damage and also as a screenwriter idea stapled to his shirt.
Then there is Ghost Eye, played by Zahn McClarnon, who commands the screen with glances the way some actors need paragraphs. He leads a local group determined to bring the shirt home to the community it was taken from. He says little and means every word. He is helped by Mandy’s young son, Cal. The boy has immersed himself in Native history to the point where he insists he is the return of a legendary figure. That claim draws some side eye in the story. There are small moments where older voices warn him not to say such things out loud. The film wants this to be complicated. It is. Not always in the ways the movie thinks.
The format lets Americana jump around with energy. One minute we stare across a diner counter at Penny Jo and Lefty as they swap shy smiles. The next minute we watch two men argue over property and power while the blood on the carpet slowly spreads. The tone is saucy and violent, with a setup punchline pattern where the punchline usually involves a weapon. Every now and then a line pops with real wit. A Lakota character throws out a nickname for Cal that tips its hat to a seventies icon and it lands. Then there are passages where a character pulls a long speech out of nowhere and you can feel the keys click in the writers room.
The climax is a long and loud convergence with a shootout that refuses to end when it probably should. The final stretch throws so much at the screen that your patience may start to flag. A particularly nasty visual joke involves a body left on the roadside with a familiar blue carton sitting neatly beside it. The movie thinks this is mordant and cool. You may disagree.
Tony Tost wrote and directed the piece. This is his first feature. He has been part of successful television, including the mystery show that people kept recommending to their parents last year. You can see the confidence in individual scenes and in a few of the images. He likes old school Americana textures. Trucks. Neon. A bar that still has a cigarette smell baked into the wood. There is craft here. There is also strain. The structure that seems playful in the first hour becomes a burden as the film tries to tie every thread and hit every twist. It starts to feel like homework.
The writing is a mixed bag. I say that knowing how hard it is to make characters like this feel fresh. There are zippy exchanges early on that crack a smile. There is a joke about Cal getting called a tiny version of a cult movie hero that honestly made me chuckle. But other turns land with a thud. Some surprises exist only to yank the plot in a new direction. When the backstory for Mandy unfurls, it carries a grim weight in theory but plays like an index card from a more lurid film. The narration keeps reaching for clever and then slipping on its own shoes.
The bigger issue is the way the people in the story are drawn. They are very colorful. They swing for bold traits that you can describe in a sentence. Penny Jo has a stammer and a dream. Lefty is chivalrous and broken and quick to ask for a hand in marriage. The sleazy dealer enjoys being disgusting. The gangster is polite and lethal. The spiritual leader is fierce and calm. Those kinds of summaries are fine in an elevator pitch but a movie needs interior life. Too often the traits feel like costumes. You can see the stitches.
That is where the performers earn their paycheck. Sydney Sweeney brings a soft and slightly awkward energy to Penny Jo. There are scenes at the start where she and Hauser talk over coffee and reach for each other with big hopeful eyes. The way they listen to one another is naturally charming. It feels like the start of a different movie, one that would have given them room to breathe and sing and maybe even make mistakes that do not require a mop. The film soon shoves them to the edge so the gears of the crime plot can grind. You feel the loss immediately.
Hauser continues his streak of playing men who are stronger than they look and more haunted than they will admit. He makes Lefty tender rather than pitiful, which is not easy. Halsey turns up as Mandy and holds the camera with a calm focus that you might not expect from someone who could have coasted on pop star energy. She has already taken a few acting swings and this one suggests she could keep doing it if she wants to. Zahn McClarnon, a veteran at communicating layers without speeches, gives the film a moral spine whenever he appears. Simon Rex leans into the sweat and slime that the script asks of him. Toby Huss gives us a man who thinks money is a shield and learns otherwise. Eric Dane bring a bulldozer vibe to Dillon. It is a sturdy group. Their work raises the floor. It does not repair the foundation.
We should talk about the cultural element at the center of all this. A Ghost Shirt is not just a title device. It is tied to a history that involves loss and belief and trauma. The film wants to acknowledge that. It also wants to be a wild genre ride that sprays bullets and cracks jokes while it skids around corners. Those two ambitions can live together, but it takes a steady hand and a careful ear. Sometimes Americana handles it with respect. There are glimmers where the story listens. Other times it feels like the relic is a hot potato passed between characters who barely understand the weight of what they hold. The movie nods toward critique of exploitation and then races off to the next skirmish.
Visually, the movie has a grit that suits the story. No shiny frames. There is dust in the light. The towns feel lived in. The diner is the kind of place where the day’s specials chalkboard has not been replaced in ten years. The soundtrack leans into twang. There are a few needle drops that try very hard to sell a mood. The editing in the first half keeps things lively without drawing attention to itself. As the story piles up, the cutting accelerates and the rhythm goes choppy. You start to miss those early pauses where the scenes could exhale.
The title suggests a big canvas portrait of the country. The movie never quite earns that sweep. It scratches at some American obsessions. Ownership. Fame. The idea that a person can grasp one shiny object and climb out of their life. The ache of war that follows people home long after the parade is over. The way small towns can be tight and loving and also endlessly cruel. All of that is in the background, sometimes in the foreground, but the movie struggles to bring it into a coherent statement. It feels like five different ideas taped together and asked to run a marathon.
Some viewers will forgive the mess because there are sequences that pop. A conversation curdles into menace. A silent walk down a hallway makes your stomach knot. A quick cutaway lands a punchline. I wish there were more of those calm pleasures because the over the top sections go on and on. When everything is loud, nothing is loud. The finale especially pushes so hard that it drains away the earlier charm. There is a beautiful version of this movie sitting inside the footage. Maybe twenty minutes shorter. Maybe with fewer detours. Maybe with a different last act.
I kept thinking about how good Sweeney and Hauser are together and how the movie keeps pulling them apart. You can feel the live wire connection in those early diner scenes where they bounce jokes back and forth and let their insecurities peek out. Then the script hustles them into the machinery. It becomes about chasing and grabbing and hiding and bleeding, and their spark becomes one puzzle piece among many. That is not a sin in a caper story. It just feels like a missed chance in this one.
Halsey’s work is worth singling out too. She plays Mandy with a steadiness that holds even when the writing around her turns pulpy and grand. She is not trying to steal scenes. She is trying to be a person. That choice pays off when the story flips through her past. Some of it is too convenient. Her control keeps it from collapsing.
If you love the kind of pulpy thriller that wants to be playful and shocking, you might find enough here to occupy an evening. If you go in wanting a fresh take that reinvents the formula, you may find yourself sighing when the obvious twist arrives right on time. The film is ambitious. It looks good. It swings. It does not land clean. The aftertaste is not bitterness exactly. More like frustration.
For those who want this particular flavor done with a little more elegance, there is a recent gem set down in the arid corners of the southwest that slides along with a sharper blade. It is leaner and somehow nastier and funnier at the same time. It knows when to hold back. It knows when to let the audience participate in the joke. That is a trick more movies should try.
As for anyone newly converted to the Sydney Sweeney fandom machine, there are better places to begin than Americana if you want to see what she can really do. Go back to the series that started a lot of the chatter. She can be raw and vulnerable and wickedly funny there, sometimes all in the space of one scene. You come away with a deeper sense of range than this movie allows.
A few final notes if you are still curious.
– Americana is the first feature from Tony Tost, a writer who has spent time in television and brings some of that episodic DNA with him.
– The cast is not the problem. They are strong enough to make individual scenes sing even when the story gets tangled.
– The movie looks right for the world it imagines. Dusty roads. Yellowed light. That washed out patina of small town bars and living rooms.
– The structure might test your patience. Five chapters. Many points of view. Lots of crossover. It sparkles early. It drags late.
– The treatment of the Lakota and the Ghost Shirt shows care in moments and carelessness in others. The film tries to hold both reverence and mischief. It does not always judge well when to switch between them.
In the end, Americana is a handsome misfire. It is a movie with attitude and a solid eye that cannot make its pieces click into place. It is also the kind of failure that remains interesting to talk about. You can see the version that might have worked and that makes it easier to discuss what did not. Not every movie has to be a home run to be worth a look. But this one leaves you wishing it had trusted its best elements more and its loudest impulses less.
You do get a fresh reminder that Sweeney is not famous by accident. She can hold your attention with a look and upload a whole stack of emotions into a quiet line. Hauser continues to build a career of complicated good guys who do not stand in the center of the frame but stick with you anyway. Halsey shows that she has the tools to chase acting seriously if she feels like it. McClarnon grounds every room he walks into. There is a lot of talent on display. It just never quite finds a shared rhythm.
If you want to chase down a new crime thriller this weekend because the weather is cooling and the popcorn smells right, you could pick worse. If you are feeling choosy, there are smarter options that dance through similar territory with more grace. That may sound harsh. It is not meant to be. Americana tries hard. It just tries to do everything at once and ends up scattering its best ideas across the floor.
