On Aug. 15, the neo-noir Americana was given a long-deferred wide release after first being exhibited at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film & TV Festival in March 2023 — long before denim garments came to define the star. Yes, before Sydney Sweeney became a purveyor of blue jeans, a figurehead in the latest iteration of the culture wars, or even an especially big star, she was merely a damn good actress. In the future, it will likely be impossible for Sweeney to fully shed the dual status she has acquired as icon and woke culture apostate, but for one last weekend, audiences were given the opportunity to be reminded of her relatively modest origins.

That moviegoers reacted with a shrug at the box office is no reflection on Sweeney, who is unquestionably the best thing about this promising but ultimately unsatisfying movie. To a degree that might surprise those who regard her sex appeal as her most salient cinematic feature, Sweeney manages to embody the film’s unremittingly (and perhaps unintentionally) bleak moral vision. Casting directors should take note, but they won’t.

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Sweeney stars as Penny Jo, a South Dakota diner waitress with an appealing smile, an ingratiating stammer, a scarf in her hair, and deep reserves of ruthless ambition. Clearly conversant in the history of crime fiction, writer-director Tony Tost seems to have conceived Penny Jo as an heir to that other waitress in the annals of noir, Cora in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (and its many cinematic adaptations). To his credit, Tost seems to have recognized that Sweeney’s bubbly beauty can serve as an effective mask for more sinister motives. 

Tost is also adept at setting Penny Jo loose in a world full of lethally ambitious schemers, many more obviously lethal than she. The plot revolves around the attempts of various parties to get a hold of a Lakota ghost shirt that has come into the possession of a supercilious business tycoon and acquirer of rare artifacts, Pendleton Duvall (Toby Huss). A plot is hatched by a borderline legitimate dealer in antiquities, Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), to make off with the ghost shirt and resell it for a tidy profit. These plans are made known to Penny Jo after she roots around in the leftovers of a customer who has conveniently noted on a napkin his intention to meet with his coconspirators at a later date. 

In the best tradition of Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern plotting out their next moves in a diner in Blue Velvet, Penny Jo teams with a perpetually forlorn-looking customer named Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), who, in the generic marriage proposal he recites by rote, boasts “a nice house, a strong back, and a heart full of love to give.” But like everyone else in Americana, he also has an instinct for spy work and a willingness to perpetrate, or at least go along with, some pretty sketchy activity. To better preserve their likability, the film seems to want to situate Penny Jo and Lefty on the periphery of most of the truly violent action, but there are early hints, in the best noir tradition, that neither character will get away spiritually clean. After all, Penny Jo nurtures dreams of selling her songs about “cheatin’,” “drinkin’,” and “hurtin’” in Nashville. And that will require money, won’t it?

Naturally, the theft of the ghost shirt by the stooges in the employ of Roy Lee is accompanied by many deceased bodies — the first of the many bloodbaths in Americana, which has a distressingly expedient approach to on-screen carnage. One gets the impression that characters are felled, whether by bullet or by bow and arrow, whenever they become inconvenient for the forward momentum of the plot, which is overly elaborate in the manner of a 1990s-era Quentin Tarantino rip-off. Also suggestive of the outsize (and somewhat dated) influence of Tarantino are pop culture shoutouts as obscure as a reference to Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and the use of “chapter”-style title cards to break up the movie into sections.

In a key twist, one of Roy Lee’s stooges turns out to be Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane), who comes to have designs on the ghost shirt as a means to enrich him and his mightily unhappy family unit: his girlfriend, Mandy (Halsey), and her little boy, Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman). Mandy, meanwhile, has approximately the same idea as Dillon. All of this action, more or less, is followed by Penny Jo and Lefty, who, at their most amusing, suggest slightly smarter versions of the Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt characters in the Coen Brothers’ funniest film, Burn After Reading.

THE SURPRISINGLY TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF ‘THE NAKED GUN’

Somewhere along the way, though, the movie shifts from being apolitically involving to dangerously close to woke in a manner far more typical of 2023, when the picture was first shown, than 2025, when it is finally being unleashed on the general public. In one of the least credible threads of the story, Mandy’s son Cal has become possessed by the spirit of Sitting Bull — not his actual spirit, as the young lad persistently and inexplicably claims, but his metaphoric spirit in his precocious sense of righteous indignation over the treatment of Native Americans. In time, Cal induces Native American leader Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon) to get in on the chase for the ghost shirt. Eventually, the assorted good and bad actors converge on the premises of Mandy’s father, who is, of all things, a psychopathic religious cult leader. Enough! Any movie that dares call itself Americana is striving (and likely straining) for a maximalist vision of this crazy country, but this movie is crazier than it needs to be. As the movie barrels its way to the finish line, we are exhausted, not only by the plot turns but the tonal turns from raucous yarn to solemn meditation on the ills of colonization or cultural appropriation or … something. 

Yet Sweeney gives the movie a throughline that is strangely satisfying. Although Penny Jo is sidelined for large chunks of the action, she has evidently never forsaken her dream to extract some money from the machinations involving the ghost shirt, and, eventually, she does just that. In the last scene, Penny Jo, newly liberated from her stammer, sings all by her lonesome as she embarks on the long journey from South Dakota to Nashville. I suspect we are meant to regard this moment as one of female empowerment, but Sweeney suggests something else: The good-natured waitress we met two hours earlier has witnessed or participated in all manner of mayhem. And for what? To land a record deal? Whether Tost intended to express this or not, the movie, through Sweeney, seems to be saying something far darker than its lame flirtation with woke politics: that money trumps all. Americana is worth seeing — for Sweeney and her instant classic neo-noir characterization.  

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.