'Americana' Review: An Ambitious, But Messy Black Crime-Comedy With No Identity of its Own
- Dan Bremner
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
By Dan Bremner - September 30, 2025
Premiering at SXSW in 2023 and then immediately collecting dust for over two years before a half-hearted VOD/cinema release, Americana feels like exactly that kind of film: a project no one quite knew what to do with. It wants to be an ambitious, sweeping crime saga with an ensemble cast, but the result is a derivative, slightly confused neo-Western that plays like a Tarantino/Coen Brothers starter pack from the early 2000s. It’s not awful, it’s not great, it’s just aggressively… fine. The sort of film you watch on a lazy Sunday, forget by Monday, and then confuse with three other VOD thrillers by the weekend.
What is Americana about?
On paper it’s a tidy enough setup: a shy waitress, a lovelorn veteran, a ruthless criminal, and a rare artifact everyone seems to want for reasons that quickly go from murky to outright shady. The plot threads weave in and out, sometimes neatly. Director Tony Tost tries to sell a hyperlink narrative with multiple POVs, intertwining fates and for stretches it's engaging: you get a satisfying rhythm of setup, payoff, and character collision. But as the film progresses those threads fray as motivations blur and the structure begins to feel like someone rearranged the chapters on a whim.
The positives are obvious: the cast is stacked and having fun. Sydney Sweeney is reliable as usual, Zahn McClarnon brings gravitas as always, and Paul Walter Hauser seems physically incapable of phoning it in. Halsey, surprisingly, steals every scene she’s in, swaggering through the film like she wandered in from a better film. Even Simon Rex pops up, proving once again he’s great at playing scuzzy charmers. The desert landscapes, shot in New Mexico, look gorgeous on widescreen; Tost clearly knows how to frame an empty highway against a dying sun. If you squint, you get flickers of that melancholic neo-Western vibe.
With the messy screenplay, the hyperlink structure is ambitious and, at its best, keeps you guessing, at its worst it spreads its characters too thin. Several subplots splash onto the screen only to vanish without payoff, and a handful of interesting side characters feel like missed opportunities. There’s a desire here to say something about heritage and exploitation, but the script skirts too close to pastiche when it tries to tackle the ethics of provenance and cultural ownership. It’s the kind of film that wants to be taken seriously about history and legacy while also winking at you like a genre exercise, and you can’t do both cleanly without a firmer hand.
Is Americana Worth Watching?
Americana isn’t a disaster, just a messy, half-baked experiment that juggles too much. You’ll enjoy the performances, appreciate the look, maybe even appreciate the ambition. But it’s too muddled, too indebted to better filmmakers, and too forgettable to make a lasting impression. It very much feels like a relic of the early 2000s Coen Brothers/Tarantino wannabes, for better and worse.
Americana was theatrically released in the U.S. and Canada on August 15, 2025, and is now available for digital rent or purchase on YouTube, Apple TV or Prime Video
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