Some movies collapse under the weight of their ambition, while others barely get off the ground because there was never much to hold them up in the first place. Americana, Tony Tost’s much-hyped directorial debut ensemble piece starring Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser, somehow manages to do both. It struts onto the screen like a swaggering outlaw with a stolen six-shooter, only to trip over its boots before it can fire a single meaningful shot. The result is a hollow exercise in wannabe coolness: a movie so desperate to look like it belongs in the realism of Tarantino or the Coens that it forgets to tell a coherent story worth caring about.

The film’s premise is ripe with possibilities. A stolen Lakota Ghost Shirt—a sacred relic with historical and spiritual weight—sets off a violent chain of events in rural South Dakota. On paper, that’s a potent setup. In execution, it’s a tonal mess. Instead of treating the material with care or edge, the film reduces everything to quirk and coincidence, as if cultural exploitation, grief, and bloodshed could all be softened by a few smirking chapter breaks and some thrift-store outfits.

At the center is Sydney Sweeney as Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress with a stutter and a dream of singing country music. The stutter is supposed to lend her vulnerability, but it feels pasted on, a screenwriter’s shorthand for “fragile dreamer” rather than an authentic trait. Sweeney is better than this, but the character is underwritten, little more than a pile of quirks masquerading as depth. It’s less a role than a branding exercise, one of which I wasn’t a fan of.

Paul Walter Hauser fares only slightly better as Lefty Ledbetter, Penny Jo’s overeager suitor whose solution to every problem seems to be proposing marriage. Hauser has a gift for making pathetic characters oddly likable, but here the script leaves him stranded. Lefty isn’t sympathetic or tragic—he’s just an annoying yet timid man in a movie full of cartoonish characters. By the time he staggers into the blood-soaked finale, you’re not invested in his fate so much as waiting for the credits to roll. The supporting cast—Halsey, Zahn McClarnon, and Eric Dane—have brief flashes of hopeful energy, but they’re all swallowed by the film’s incoherence. McClarnon, in particular, is wasted, his gravitas smothered by the film’s refusal to let any storyline breathe.

Visually, Americana does its best to trick you into thinking it’s a better film than it is. The cinematography is slick, the lighting moody, the costumes dusty. For a moment or two, it looks like a country-noir worth settling into, but the polish only highlights the emptiness beneath. Beautifully shot nonsense is still nonsense, and no amount of golden-hour sunsets or headlights shining in the dark can disguise the fact that this is a movie without a pulse.

Worst of all, Americana is tonally confused as to what it wants to be. Tost wants to juggle weighty themes—colonial trauma, the emptiness of the American dream, the commodification of culture—while still indulging in ironic flourishes and forced eccentricity. The whimsy undercuts the seriousness, and the seriousness drains the whimsy. Scenes that should sting collapse into awkward comedy, while moments meant to be funny die on the vine. By the time the film lurches into its bloody climax, it feels more like a director throwing up his hands and saying, “Well, at least people will remember the third act” (I know that’s what it was for me). The truth is, they won’t. What people will remember is Sydney Sweeney, straining to sell a character built on clichés. They’ll remember Paul Walter Hauser, gamely mugging his way through another scene where his desperation is supposed to read as charm. They’ll remember the empty gestures toward something profound. And then they’ll forget the movie entirely.

Americana could have been something—a tense small-town crime saga, a sharp cultural critique, a star vehicle that allowed its cast to do something meaningful. Instead, it’s a patchwork of borrowed ideas, cheap quirks, and wasted potential. It may have eccentric noise from its premiere at South by Southwest…in 2023. Aside from that, there’s not much to Americana, and it doesn’t help that a film starring an actress such as Sweeney isn’t getting much fanfare. For all its dusty vistas and bloody showdowns, it leaves behind nothing but the faint scent of ambition gone sour.

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