AMERICANA (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Americana, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2025

Ironies and eccentricities abound in Americana, from a right-handed man named Lefty to a little white boy who's convinced he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. On the surface, this is a strange story that tells a neo-noir plot in a distinct rhythm. Just beneath that, though, is the story of a bunch of people who know exactly what they want but can't seem to grasp even a trace of that thing.

Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser, who has perfected this kind of likeable guy who's too decent to be brushed off as a loser), for example, is a rancher who wants a wife, which is really to say that he just doesn't want to be lonely on that ranch anymore. The poor guy tries—poorly, it should be added. When we first meet him, he's rehearsing a marriage proposal that he's hoping to offer to his girlfriend. Soon enough, he does recite it to her, but her response is that they've only been on three dates. Lefty counters that it has actually been four, but he's not the kind of guy to understand that, if a guy is making that kind of point after proposing marriage, the proposal itself was probably a terrible idea, certain to go nowhere, in the first place.

In a story that becomes about tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and a rare shirt that could be worth up to half a million bucks to the right buyer, that scene in writer/director Tony Tost's screenplay is technically unnecessary. Tost, making his directorial debut, includes it because that scene is absolutely necessary to understand Lefty, why he would go along with a ridiculous scheme to steal the aforementioned shirt from a gang of murderous goons, and how he doesn't seem to realize that the woman he practices that proposal on would probably accept it in a heartbeat if it was aimed at her.

She's a server at a little diner somewhere in rural South Dakota named Penny Jo (Sydney Sweeney). She is quite pretty, which might be why Lefty doesn't consider that she might have feelings for him, and has a stammer, which is certainly caused by the household where she grew up, if a single scene with her awful mother (played by Harriet Sansom Harris) is any indication. It's indication enough, to be clear, and Penny Jo has dreams of leaving from under her mother's roof, the diner, and the state more broadly to head off to Nashville and try her luck as a country singer.

Again, none of that is essential to comprehending the plot, except that it's basic motivation for why Penny Jo would come up with the plan to rob those murdering thieves. They've been hired by Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) to steal a Lakota ghost shirt from some wealthy collector. When Dillon (Eric Dane) and Dave (Joe Adler) show up at the collector's house, they immediately shoot everyone in the room who sees them. That's also completely unnecessary—as well as terrifying, since we know they're only getting and splitting $10,000 between them for the theft. That the two men do it, though, tells us everything we need to know about them, too, as well the people with whom they associate.

It would be easy to go on and on about these little details, but that would take too long, because Tost's film is filled with them. We haven't even specifically mentioned the boy, named Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), who believes he's the reincarnation of a Lakota chief or his mother Mandy (a very convincing Halsey), who comes up with her own plan to rob her boyfriend Dillon before Penny Jo and Lefty arrive at their mobile home in the middle of nowhere. It is amusing that even a homicidal sociopath like Dillon knows that Cal's appropriation of Native American culture is "offensive," but it's even funnier that the members of a Lakota people's army, led by Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), on a local reservation humor the kid, because they're sure he knows who has the ghost shirt and where it is.

The plot, which starts in media res and proceeds in chapters, is very simple, because the only things that matter for it are the shirt, who has it, and where it is at any given moment. That item could be anything, really, except that Tost is working with and subverting the expectations, clichés, and legends of Westerns and the Old West as this goes, too.

Indeed, the climax, set on a secluded ranch led by a backwards man (played by Christopher Kriesa) with very specific opinions about women and a connection to one of the main characters, almost seems to go back in time for an old-fashioned frontier standoff. That Tost pulls off that gimmick, makes it logical within this story, lets that reflection of the past mean something about the present, and still maintains the suspense of the sequence is a nifty little trick.

The film's narrative has a few tricks, really, but they only matter because Tost and this cast cut through them to the sad, lost, and uncertain hearts of the characters within this story. There's reason to sympathize with them all—except the worst of the worst, of course, who want money for its own sake, artifacts of culture for the novelty of them, and violence because it makes them feel powerful. Americana lets us see these characters, because this is a film made up little details that create a picture that's bigger and more important than any kind of plotting.

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