Paul Walter Hauser as Lefty Ledbetter and Sydney Sweeney as Penny Jo Poplin in a scene from "Americana." (Photo by Ursula Coyote, courtesy of Lionsgate)
It's a common misconception that Popcorn Frights, that popular cinema showcase of all things bloody, creepy and pulse-pounding, is strictly a horror film festival. The annual celebration of pulpy pictures and unnerving visions, which wraps up this weekend in Broward County, extends its exploration of genre well beyond slasher films and disturbing nightmare fuel. The big tent raised every August by co-founders/co-directors Marc Ferman and Igor Shteyrenberg encompasses a wide array of themes, topics and itches its programmers are dying to scratch.
Take, for instance, “Americana,” a reasonably buzzy, 1990s-flavored blend of crime thriller and neo-Western. The Lionsgate release had its Florida premiere Monday night as part of Popcorn Frights, but do not fret, mayhem enthusiasts, because the bruising, darkly funny film is now out in theaters and available to all movie buffs who like their pulp fictions with a dash of country.
Writer-director Tony Tost's debut feature boasts a mostly linear script with a chapter structure that recalls early Quentin Tarantino. Its ensemble cast includes some menacing meanies that bring to mind the early films of Joel and Ethan Coen, as well as the work of Western filmmakers from an earlier age of Tinseltown like Budd Boetticher and Sam Peckinpah. The blistering cocktail Tost has whipped up is at its most effective when he veers away from the wheel spinning and lets us listen to his characters. Because they have a lot on their mind.
Even when they don't behave like they contain multitudes. Penny Jo Poplin (Sydney Sweeney) may wait tables in rural South Dakota by day, but at night she dreams of taking off to Nashville to follow in the footsteps of her idol, Dolly Parton. She's not going to let a stutter or a shy demeanor stop her from reaching for the stars. She befriends Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), a good-natured but needy military vet who's spectacularly unlucky in love, most likely because he won't stop proposing to the women he begins dating.
Halsey as Mandy Starr in a scene from "Americana." (Photo by Ursula Coyote, courtesy of Lionsgate)
Penny Jo and Lefty are a likable duo, but they rub shoulders with some unsavory characters. Not one to get his hands dirty, crooked antiquities dealer Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) hires the services of the even more crooked Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane, aka Sweeney's “Euphoria” castmate) and his associate, Fun Dave (Joe Adler), to steal a rare Native American artifact from Pendleton Duvall (“King of the Hill's” Toby Huss, recently seen in the horror film “Weapons”) a snobbish petit bourgeois fond of hosting dinner parties where the Belle Glos flows freely.
The underworld rendezvous unfolds in the diner where Penny Jo works, and after she overhears the ruffians, she talks Lefty into teaming up to snatch the item in question, an orange Lakota ghost shirt, after the bad guys steal it. Complications ensue, as they tend to do in these tales of dirty deeds in the New West, and the bodies pile up quick. And that's even before a militant Indigenous group, led by the stoic Ghost Eye (“Dark Winds'” Zahn McClarnon), enters the bloody mix.
It's not as if the story, with its disturbing twists and turns, is uninteresting, but Tost, a poet turned TV showrunner, is more adept at creating interesting characters than he is at constructing a fluid narrative, and in ensuring all of the moving pieces fall into place, he sidelines Penny Jo and Left for whole stretches. While these more prominent characters are off-screen, the director weaves in another storyline, about Mandy Starr (pop star Halsey, making her feature acting debut), Dillon's fed-up girlfriend, and her strange son Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), who has an affinity for Native American culture and an increasingly annoying metaphysical claim. (Hint: It's likely Tost has seen the Nicole Kidman film “Birth.”)
Mother and son have important roles to play, including, in Mandy's case, a narrative detour into her traumatic past that's compelling enough to be its own movie (think V.C. Andrews by way of Louis L'Amour). It's a pretty compelling segment, in the way it deals with gender roles and misogyny in a domestic setting, but Tost has already established Penny Jo and Lefty as the film's emotional anchor, and their absence is felt. The shortened screen time makes Sweeney's character, in particular, feel underdeveloped. It's ironic, because the “Anyone But You” and “Immaculate” star is the film's most prominent selling point to moviegoers.
Eric Dane as Dillon MacIntosh, Joe Adler as Fun Dave and Simon Rex as Roy Lee Dean in a scene from "Americana." (Photo by Ursula Coyote, courtesy of Lionsgate)
Hauser, on the other hand, manages to make a strong impression despite the hurdles. “Americana” made its world premiere at the 2023 South by Southwest Festival, so it was made before he and Sweeney reached their current level of fame. After a summer spent being underutilized in big summer releases like “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” and “The Naked Gun,” it's gratifying to see Hauser show off his chops in a substantial role that fits him like a glove.
If only the film surrounding Hauser lived up to his performance. It's clear Tost wants to explore America's current divisions, its roiling cultural unrest, from an intriguing genre-splicing perspective. The film's climactic showdown features some powerful imagery that put a modern-day spin into the cowboys-and-Indians clashes of the past. (This is the New West. Only slightly different from the Old West.) But Tost struggles to balance the myriad elements he has introduced, and just as he bungles the climax because he lets it go on too long, “Americana” ends up feeling lumpy and oddly anticlimactic.
Tost has made a strikingly lensed near miss, but one with enough interesting stuff on the edges to suggest he has a considerably better film in him. His inclusion of Tammy Wynette's “Til I Can Make It on My Own,” for example, is the kind of needle drop that would make Tarantino nod in approval. His next tricked-up oater needs to be leaner and more streamlined. My thumb, alas, is very reluctantly down.
Gavin Maddox Bergman as Cal Starr and Zahn McClarnon as Ghost Eye in a scene from "Americana." (Photo by Ursula Coyote, courtesy of Lionsgate)
“Americana” is now showing in theaters across South Florida, including Regal South Beach, AMC Aventura 24, CMX Cinemas Dolphin 19, Regal Dania Pointe and Paradigm Cinemas: Gateway Fort Lauderdale. For more information about the films screening in theaters and virtually as part of this year's Popcorn Frights, go to popcornfrights.com.
