Sydney Sweeney, Halsey Get Violent in Movie

Sydney Sweeney is an aspiring country singer who concocts a risky scheme to get some cash in the trailer for Americana.

Writer-director Tony Tost’s crime feature hits theaters Aug. 22 from Lionsgate after premiering at SXSW in 2023. Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey, Eric Dane, Zahn McClarnon and Simon Rex also star in the contemporary Western movie.

Americana centers on a number of people whose paths intersect as they try to track down a rare Native American artifact known as a “ghost shirt.”

“I got a really dumb idea I’d like to run by you,” Sweeney tells Hauser in the trailer. “I think something bad is going down.”

Later, as violence ensues, Halsey exclaims, “Right now, I’m apparently in the middle of a goddamn murder spree.”

Tost, who serves as the showrunner for the Peacock series Poker Face, marks his feature directorial debut with the film that he helmed from his own script. Alex Saks produces the movie.

Sweeney can also soon be seen in the Apple TV+ film Echo Valley alongside Julianne Moore and in the forthcoming Lionsgate thriller The Housemaid opposite Amanda Seyfried.

In his review of Americana for The Hollywood Reporter, critic Justin Lowe wrote, “Tost incorporates the wide-open spaces, cultural conflicts and endemic lawlessness typical to Westerns, while inverting conventional expectations by foregrounding Native American perspectives on some of the film’s thornier social issues.”

He added, “At the same time, the frequent shootouts, unusual weapon choices (compound bows and game-hunting arrows) and high body counts imply an amusingly ironic subversion of the genre.”