Americana is a comedic crime/thriller starring Emmy Award-winner Paul Walter Hauser alongside Sydney Sweeney. The two stars play a budding couple out in South Dakota with dreams of country music superstardom. When Hauser’s character catches wind on the knowledge of a rare Native American artifact worth half a million dollars, the lovebirds decide to use it as a golden ticket to make their dreams a reality.
Americana: A Star-Studded Race Against Time
At the same time that Hauser’s character is hatching a plan to seize the artifact- described as a “Ghost Shirt”- multiple other individuals enter the fray attempting to claim it for themselves. Two men break into the home guarding the shirt and retrieve the shirt. The next day, a single mom played by three-time Billboard Music Award-winning recording artist Halsey catches the thieves by surprise. She subdues them and then claims the shirt for herself and her son.
All hell begins to break loose as an Indigenous man(Hawkeye star Zahn McClarnon) swings by her home to retrieve the half-a-million dollars artifact. He has a humorous exchange with Halsey’s misguided son that gives off the eccentric vibes of the Coen Brothers’ older films. Gunfire goes off and it appears as though lives will be caught in the crossfire over the Ghost Shirt and the riches it can bring.
According to the cast list on IMDB, Red Rocket lead Simon Rex plays another interested party in the Ghost Shirt named Roy Lee Dean. Sydney Sweeney is reunited with her Euphoria co-star Eric Dane who is playing Dillion Macintosh. Macintosh is the muscle Roy hires to ensure he gets ahold of the Lakota Shirt. Licorice Pizza’s Harriet Samsom Harris will be Tish and established character actor Toby Huss joins as Pendleton Duvall.
What Inspired The Making of Americana?
The writer-director of the neo-Western Americana Tony Tost got his start in the industry writing episodes of the hit series Longmire which starred Lou Diamond Phillips and Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff. He primarily worked in television before making a jump to the big screen with the neo-Western. The trailer has elements and shades of lauded crime films of the past including those of Oscar-winning talents Quentin Tarantino and Three Billboards filmmaker Martin McDonagh.
However, surprisingly, it was primarily the Lakota people and their culture tied to shirts and religion that he used to shape its story. The films of the 70s and the work of modern maestros such as Steven Spielberg were most influential to Tost also were cited when working on Americana. In an interview with ScriptMag, he described the collaboration with the film’s cinematographer Nigel Bluck on solidifying the look and feel of the film.
“I don’t have the inside working knowledge of the lenses that Nigel has, but I do know what I want it to look like. So I gave him a list of films, mostly films from the 70s like, The Sugarland Express, Joseph Sargent’s White Lightning with Burt Reynolds, Paris, Texas, a couple of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, but mostly movies from the 70s,” Tost gushed.”We were just kind of talking like, ‘Let’s aim for that like that vibe.’”
The Verdict
While Westerns in today’s IP and superhero-laden culture seems like a huge gamble, it is very admirable for Tony Tost to put pen to paper and craft a wholly original story in this genre. It’s highly evident that this cast has the chops to tell a compelling and entertaining narrative. At the same time, a streaming series with this premise and off-kilter scenarios would be much more profitable for all involved. Hopefully, it gets Tony Tost more eyes and funding for his future projects in the vein of contemporaries like Taylor Sheridan and mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig.
