Americana (2025)
Directed by: Tony Tost
Premise: The lives of several people intersect with a stolen Lakota ghost shirt. Various groups try to recover the artifact through any means necessary.
What Works: Americana is a neo-western. These films, which include Hell or High Water and Wind River, are generally contemporary stories that play on tropes and themes of the western genre. Americana does this in a deliberate way. The filmmakers interrogate the myth of the western. The story revolves around a Lakota ghost shirt that has been stolen from a private collector and becomes a MacGuffin. Several groups of people compete for possession of the artifact, most of them believing they can sell it on the black market. In classic westerns the frontier represented the possibility of the future. In Americana, poor and desperate people scramble for possession of the scraps that remain. It’s a provocative idea that’s well dramatized. The movie doesn’t feel didactic. The ideas are embedded organically into the story. Americana has a concrete sense of place and although the cast includes a few big names the blend into the surroundings. Standout performances include Halsey as a single mother on the run and Gavin Maddox Bergman as her son, Sydney Sweeney as a waitress, Paul Walter Hauser as a rancher, and Derek Hinkey as the leader of a Native American militia. These people are empathetic and the story brings them together in a way that makes internal sense.
What Doesn’t: Americana aspires to be a miniepic. It has a large cast of characters, the story plays on the setting and themes of westerns, and the filmmakers reach for big ideas about the identity of the United States. In many respects, Americana succeeds. However, the film is also compromised by its mostly narrow sense of justice. The characters vary from well-meaning to outright evil. For the most part, the evil characters are destroyed while the better characters survive. The filmmakers fall back on a simplistic moral worldview when the story calls for a touch of cynicism and irony. The MacGuffin of Americana is a ghost shirt which has significance to the Lakota culture and to the western genre but the filmmakers don’t capitalize on the meaning of this artifact.
Bottom Line: Americana tells a compelling crime story in a way that has interesting implications for the western genre and comments upon American identity. The film misses some opportunities to cut deeper but Americana has empathetic characters and a well told story.
Episode: #1062 (August 24, 2025)