Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | January 6, 2026
After a period of tumult, flops, and controversy, it took just one film to resurrect the faltering career of Sydney Sweeney. The Housemaid has emerged as something of a sleeper hit ($92 million so far on a $35 million budget), a second installment starring Sweeney is already in the works, and Euphoria is set to return in the spring.
Before The Housemaid, however, Sweeney endured a rough run: a high-profile flop in Christy; the less discussed flop Eden; a streaming misfire I had completely forgotten about, Echo Valley; and a 2023 film dumped in 2025 that also flopped, Americana, not to mention her 2024 disaster, Madame Web.
This is a review of Americana, which is now streaming on Starz and available on the usual digital outlets. Despite a solid cast that includes Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey, Eric Dane, Simon Rex, and the always phenomenal Zahn McClarnon, Americana is not a good movie. It is essentially a bad Tarantino rip-off, as if Quentin Tarantino were heavily sedated and a little drunk. That said, it has been a while since anyone tried to rip off Tarantino, so there is at least a faint whiff of novelty here.
Americana revolves around a MacGuffin known as the “ghost shirt,” an incredibly valuable Native American garment that passes through the hands of numerous characters. The film is structured in five parts, each centered on a different set of players.
There is Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane), a genuinely awful person who steals the ghost shirt from a party hosted by Pendleton Duvall (Toby Huss) and murders the other guests. Dillon is paid $10,000 by Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex) to steal the shirt, which Dean plans to sell for far more. Dillon, naturally, double-crosses him and decides to sell it himself. His girlfriend Mandy (Halsey) then double-crosses him, absconding with the shirt and leaving her younger brother Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), who believes he is the reincarnated spirit of Sitting Bull, to fend for himself. Cal does so by killing Dillon and alerting a group dedicated to preserving Native American artifacts, led by Ghost Eye (McClarnon), to the shirt’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, Sweeney plays a waitress with a severe stutter who becomes oddly smitten with a Paul Walter Hauser character named Lefty Ledbetter, despite the fact that he is right-handed, which passes for a running joke. They learn about the ghost shirt and decide to steal it themselves, following Mandy to her parents’ home, which also happens to house a strange fundamentalist cult. Inevitably, it all builds to a bloody showdown, and if you have ever seen a Tarantino movie, you can probably guess how it ends.
I would be fine with all of this if the writing were not so frequently cringey, and if Sweeney’s performance were not so awful. Her stutter sounds less like a speech impediment and more like hiccups. You can practically see her brain working through every pause. It is distracting and feels largely unnecessary, except as a clumsy way to explain why someone who looks like Sydney Sweeney might be interested in someone who looks like Paul Walter Hauser. In the world of Americana, apparently, a stutter drops her into his league.
To be fair, it is not all bad. It is fun to see Halsey in a film role, and McClarnon’s character mercilessly razzing a white kid for cultural appropriation is genuinely funny. Still, there is a reason Americana sat on a shelf for two years and was only released to capitalize on Sweeney’s rising profile, except, uh oh, she is clearly not a box-office draw on her own. The film feels generic, less like a straight Tarantino knockoff than a rip-off of a Tarantino rip-off, like 2 Days in the Valley, than a rip-off of the real thing.
‘Americana’ is streaming on Starz and available on the usual digital platforms.
