Well, she was an American girl / Raised on promises / She couldn’t help thinkin’ that there / Was a little more to life ~ Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
There is a movie called “Americana,” an indie that premiered at SXSW in 2023 but only reached theaters last year. None of the streamers have it yet, but you can do VOD here. It is the directorial debut of Tony Tost, a poet who has also worked as the showrunner of the second season of the clever TV series “Poker Face.” The movie is a noirish modern Western that spends a not inconsiderable amount of time in a small South Dakota diner, where Penny Jo Poplin (Sydney Sweeney) works as a waitress, worships Dolly Parton, and is practically begging for a chance to break out and follow her dream of being a country singer. Indeed, Penny Jo overhears Cal Starr and his mother Mandy’s scumbag boyfriend Dillon MacIntosh chatting with a wealthy benefactor named Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) about a robbery of a Native American artifact called a “ghost shirt”. Penny Jo knows the shirt is worth even more than Roy is letting on, and figures if she can somehow intercept it, the proceeds of a sale might pay for her to go to Nashville and take her shot at a singing career. She enlists diner regular Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser), a good-natured cowboy and ranch hand, to help her hash out a plan. Lefty enacts the longstanding tradition of doing something mostly out of desire to hang out with a pretty girl.
The promise of the ghost shirt also draws in Dillon’s fed-up girlfriend Mandy (the mononymous Halsey), looking for money to start fresh again, and Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), who runs a militant organization in the tradition of the American Indian Movement. It may have been around the time that Ghost Eye explains that he named himself after “Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai” and enthusiastically recommends that Jim Jarmusch movie to Cal, that “Americana” won me over. There are also fundamentalist cults like the one the punky Mandy grew up in, standard-issue criminals like her violent boyfriend, Dillon (Eric Dane), and predatory higher-ups making money off the culture everyone else creates, like smarmy tourist-attraction owner Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) and wealthy collector Pendleton Duvall (Toby Huss).
Hauser and Sweeney are particularly cute together as a not-quite-couple with his-and-hers conditions (he has a head injury; she has a stutter) that could potentially impede their communication process, not to mention derail her starstruck train to Nashville, but instead seems to have inspired a certain directness in both of them. Sweeney’s character reminds you of Dorothy Page in “The Singing Cowgirl,” made in the 1930s.
“Americana” makes a better stab at being an actual Western, complete with homestead-style shootout, than a lot of other modern attempts at capturing the knack for elemental drama of director John Ford, who made several classics Westerns with iconic actor John Wayne. This is a pretty good, not great movie, but it achieved a certain notoriety because of Sweeney’s role in an American Eagle advertisement that blew up the internet by launching a Sweeney-centric campaign. The ads didn’t only go viral because of their sultriness, but because they were caught right in the middle of an ongoing culture backlash. Pundits were passing peach pits over the celebration of white supremacy by the play on words – good jeans/genes. Of course, there was no reflexive derision when Beyoncé wore a blonde wig and had her Levi’s jeans ad plastered all over Times Square and every fashion magazine. Or when the Queen of self-love, Lizzo, filmed a clip wearing jeans and saying, “My jeans are black.” Hold on a mo! What?
Of course, Sydney Sweeney, besides looking hot in jeans also has good genetics. Her parents are attractive, so chances are their daughter might be pretty as well. And by all accounts, she is bright and has worked very hard to have a successful career as an actress. As Tom Jones once sang, “It is not unusual” to have a gorgeous, blonde, blue-eyed classic American girl advertising denim. Every girl wants to look like her, and every guy wants to look at her.
The irony of the movie “Americana” coming out in the middle of this hot mess is that it’s a ’90s-style ensemble crime movie that engages in a sly exploration of the iconography and mythology we use to define the country. The movie is about a group of people vying for possession of a Lakota ghost shirt stolen from a wealthy white collector, one worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is told “Pulp Fiction” style, in a series of nonlinear chapters tied to different characters.
The movie is called “Americana,” however, not America, and while it treats characters as mixtures of what they were born into and what they chose for themselves, it suggests that there’s something kitschy about the very idea of national identity, whether it’s defined by what’s in your display case or the color of your eyes. If the movie sometimes sacrifices its momentum for the sake of dwelling on these ideas, it still manages to approach them with a sense of humor — and never more so than with Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), a western-obsessed boy who, either thanks to an act of spiritual possession or a bout of disassociation due to his traumatic home life, sees the ghost shirt and immediately declares himself the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. He seeks out a bemused Ghost Eye, whose response to this solemn white child informing him about the customs of his people is to mutter, “This ain’t exactly the golden age of cultural appropriation right now.”
In(ad)vertently, Sweeney became the lynchpin in this movie even though she is not the star. Her role is such an interesting one — especially because the truth is that she is entirely convincing as a girl who fades into the background. With her retro curls and meek demeanor, tucked into an enormous pink fringed jacket and grinning at her own misbehavior when she drops a swear word, she doesn’t look like a bombshell slumming it in a gritty drama. She looks like a regular girl — one swaddled in americana not tight-fitting jeans – with the ambition to be the next Dolly Parton. As she says to Lefty one night over a beer when asked if she sings country music, “What other kind of music is there?”
By the way, as I can personally attest, American Eagle does have great jeans. And sometimes a pun is just a pun.
