Americana: Sweeney Shines in Modern Western

Americana throws its strong cast into a chaotic tangled web of a Western that matches eccentric turns with pulpy direction and a surprising heart.

Sydney Sweeney (Immaculate) plays Penny Jo, a shy, stuttering waitress who aspires to be a singer in Nashville and teams up with the really, really hopeless romantic Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauserr, The Naked Gun).

But things get complicated with the involvement of criminal Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane, Bad Boys: Ride or Die). His possession of the artifact gets the attention of Mandy Starr (Halsey, MaXXXine), his bitter mistress with a dark past, which in turn leads to the involvement of her son (Gavin Maddox Bergman) who believes he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull… just go with it. Add on top of that the antiquities dealer MacIntosh is negotiating with (Simon Rex, Blink Twice) and an indigenous gang leader who wants the artifact back with his people (Zahn McClarnon, No Hard Feelings), and you can see what a tangled web of madness is unfolding here. 

You may also think this makes Americana a wild, crazy, uproarious roller coaster of a Western, and certain parts of it are. You’ve got plenty of chuckle-worthy lines and a wide variety of character types whose distinct personality clashes are all entertaining. There’s also a fair bit of the typical shootout action you’d want to see in a Western thriller towards the end, with the third act largely being one giant standoff. But the film overall is much less frenetic than you’d expect. On the contrary, the first half in particular plays out with bittersweet softness, especially when the meek Penny Jo is bonding with the equally meek Lefty.

No one in this movie is in a happy place, and none of them feel like they belong where they are. They’re all going after the artifact because either it’s all they have, they’re too crooked to see how not worth it this whole mess is, or they’ve been genuinely wronged. It’s a stretch to call any of these people sane, but because you get to sit with each of them for long enough, you still find yourself either rooting for them or enjoyably hating them. Sweeney continues to be one of the most versatile young actors out there right now, vanishing into the body of a quiet, insecure woman with a dark edge you both love and fear. My only qualm with her character is that she’s sidelined for a good chunk of the third act in ways that make her, in the moment, feel slightly superfluous.

The biggest surprise of the film to me was Halsey. I liked her fine in MaXXXine, but this is a truly great performance from her. It helps that her character has easily the most baggage and tragedy, much of which is slowly revealed throughout the film, and that she has the most to lose with her son getting involved. I really wasn’t sure what the point of that kid’s delusions was outside of a running joke – and I still think he went a bit too overboard in hindsight – but the touching resolution makes it clear what the movie is going for with him. Americana has a lot more tenderness than I was expecting, which itself is buried underneath its dark undertones that condemn a lot of the traditions some classic Westerns lean further into.

I’ve always favored these kinds of Westerns. Films like No Country for Old Men, Brokeback Mountain, and 2010’s True Grit all deliberately suck out a lot of the old-timey, romantic flair of the genre’s golden age to deconstruct the harshness those stories would have nowadays. Americana works the same way, tackling toxically antiquated norms, cultural appropriation, unhealthy obsessions with the past, and the emptiness of the present that’s kept it all going for so many years. But this isn’t an outright bleak film; it just forces the characters who wind up okay to earn their payoff, while leaving some other decent souls in the literal dust.

I was taken aback by how firm a grasp Tost has behind the camera for his first feature film. But then I looked through his past credentials and found he’s got a resume that would let him hit the ground running, including poetry, criticism (yay!), and heavy involvement in shows like Damnation and Poker Face. He and his cinematographer Nigel Bluck (whose credits include The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and The Peanut Butter Falcon) combine the wide-open epicness of most great Westerns with the close-up touch of a grizzlier thriller, while also making sure the film’s trips into comedy don’t compromise any of the other tones. 

Americana is one of the few smaller releases out right now that I can see pleasing a pretty wide range of people. It’s dramatic, funny, violent, hopeful, gloomy, and filled with deeper themes that you can read into however you want or not at all. It definitely warrants a trip to the movie theater… if you can find it. Maybe unsurprisingly, given it premiered at a festival two years ago, but this movie is being done dirty by how few theaters seem to be playing it. It’s the kind of original genre movie that I’m certain would win over most people who wanted to see it. But a big problem, as I’ve stated in another article, is that such movies are rarely marketed or distributed well.

Americana is one of my favorite films of the year so far, and if you’re fortunate enough to have it playing near you, I really recommend checking it out.

Americana is out now in U.S. theaters and will be released in UK & Irish cinemas on August 22, 2025.