Writer-director Tony Tost’s feature film debut, Americana, is a modern-day Western about a South Dakota waitress and aspiring country singer named Penny Jo, played by Sydney Sweeney, who weaves her way into a plot to sell a symbol of Native American resistance called the Ghost Shirt, believed by some Lakota people to protect the wearer against bullets.
It’s more autobiographical than you might suspect.
“These things are messy, but I’ve kind of found that I get really boring as a writer if I do straight autobiography,” Tost explains. “But if I don’t put myself in there — if I don’t put emotional skin in the game — my genre work is just hacky, you know?”
With Americana, he resolves that problem by merging the twisty storytelling of a thriller with elements of his own remarkable life story. He was born in 1975 in the Ozarks, to a teenage mother who soon moved with him to Washington State. He grew up in a trailer at the edge of the Muckleshoot Reservation with his mother and stepfather, who were the day and night custodians at his school. Money was tight.
“I remember one day in second grade, for the first time I wore a button-up shirt from Kmart,” Tost recalls. “And the teacher commented to the class, ‘Oh, isn’t it nice to see Tony in a clean new shirt?’ Which was well-intended, but it kind of makes you want to crawl under your desk and die.”
His stepfather instilled in him a love of country music and Westerns, but could also be cruel. Tost had a stammer as a boy, and “my stepdad would make fun of it, and it would make it worse.”
Writing Americana, Tost gave a stammer to Penny Jo, who, sweet and witty as she is, sometimes has a hard time getting her words out. The stammer makes her dreams of being the next Dolly Parton seem all the more ridiculous to naysayers like her mother (Harriet Sansom Harris) who shows up in Americana just long enough to make fun of her.
Hoping to leave South Dakota for Nashville, Penny Jo navigates the schemes of an intriguing cast of characters. They include Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), Penny’s unlikely suitor and partner-in-crime; the scrappy Mandy Starr (Halsey), the young mother of Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), a white child who believes he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull; and Dillon MacIntosh (Eric Dane), Mandy’s partner, who barely tolerates her son.
The Ghost Shirt connects them all with Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), an unsavory collector of Western artifacts, and Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon), who wants the Ghost Shirt back for Native American people. Tony Huss also pops up in a brief, sparkly role.
Tost always loved writing, and movies. But making them didn’t seem remotely possible as he grew up working a series of low-paying jobs: cleaning hotel rooms and condos, counting traffic, clocking in at restaurants and a pickle factory.
He honed his writing at Green River College in Auburn, Washington, then at the College of the Ozarks, back in Missouri. “I would alternate between my academic career and working,” he explains.
Eventually he earned his MFA at the University of Arkansas and Ph.D. at Duke, and became a very respected poet. He won the coveted Walt Whitman Award in 2003 for his first poetry book, Invisible Bride, and his second book of poetry, Complex Sleep, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2007. In 2011, he published Johnny Cash’s American Recordings as part of the 33 1/3 books series.
One of his University of Arkansas classmates, Nic Pizzolatto, was on his way to becoming the toast of Hollywood for creating HBO’s True Detective. He encouraged Tost to try screenwriting as well.
“The kind of poetry I did was not autobiographical, not confessional poetry. It was like weird, redneck surrealist poetry. And it was mostly like images — strange images that were hopefully capturing a vibe,” says Tost.
“Basically, it’s like juxtaposing images to create emotions, which is, I think, a pretty decent description of what screenwriting is… You’re trying to create images, situations, dialogue feeding into that. It’s through the juxtaposition or the connection between them that some third thing — this emotion, or this feel — hopefully emerges.”
“Poetry was actually, weirdly, a pretty good training ground. Most of my poems would start long, and then I would just whittle them down to the bare essentials. My screenwriting process is the same: I write scenes way too long, cut them down, then we film them, then I still take even more out of the edit, until, hopefully, it’s just the very necessity of the things, the very necessary little jewels.”
Tost wrote scripts that Pizzolatto shared with his agents, which eventually led to Tost getting his first TV jobs in his mid-30s. He worked on A&E’s and Netflix’s Longmire, where he further developed his skills.
“I was writing mysteries each episode, and that takes a real discipline. That takes a real developed skill set. You can’t just coast by on vibes,” he says.
He then created his own show, the USA Network and Netflix’s Damnation, in 2017, then worked on AMC’s The Terror. He also served as the showrunner on the just-completed Season 2 of the Peacock series Poker Face.
His work in TV fueled his lifelong desire to make a film, and he finally got his chance with Americana.
“Since I was a teenager, I wanted to be a writer-director — I thought I was going to be like the next Orson Welles, the next Paul Thomas Anderson,” he says. “Then I found myself in my 40s, working in the entertainment industry, and still hadn’t made my first movie. I’d been learning and kept working in a very competitive industry on the TV side of things, and I had a foot in the feature world, doing some rewrites and stuff like that. But I hadn’t yet put my stake in the ground as a filmmaker, and I felt like I was ready.”
He thought back to his childhood, and his mother and stepfather.
“I was daydreaming for about a year about what ended up being the opening section of Americana, which is basically this white kid who’s obsessed with Westerns and has a perhaps disconcerting feeling that he has a connection with the Native Americans in these old Westerns, and then finds himself in a kind of Old West type of situation with a hated father figure.”
He had first read about the Ghost Shirt while researching his book about Johnny Cash. Once he decided on South Dakota (and bit of Wyoming) as the setting for Americana, he went there and “just drove around for like a week, just going down random back roads. I’d go down a gravel road and I’d find a bar where there’s guys in their 70s playing country music, and I’d just sit there and drink beer and hang out with them.”
He also drove to the Pine Ridge Reservation, of the Oglala Lakota. One memory stands out: “I was just driving down this back road where I couldn’t see anything. And then, in the middle of this field, was this old, beat-up car, and someone had spray-painted on it: ‘You are on sacred ground.’ And that kind of got me in the gut.
“A version of that made it into the movie — this idea that there is a history to this place. Americana is a fun movie, but hopefully underlying it, there’s a little bit of reality that it brushes up against.”
Tony Tost on Casting Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey and More in Americana
Tost and producer Alex Saks, whose films include Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, knew that casting would be crucial to getting Americana made.
“Alex Saks was really my partner on this from the script stage,” says Tost. “Since this was a first-time filmmaker, ensemble film, neo-Western set in quote-unquote flyover company, we knew that our only chance to really get this made was with a cool cast.”
They assembled a package of a half-dozen actors, but lost most of them during the financing stage, when performers sometimes have to move on to other projects while the filmmakers wait for money to come through. But they held onto Halsey, who has her first leading dramatic role in Americana, and McClarnon, who worked with Tost on Longmire. Tost wrote the Ghost Eye part with him in mind.
Saks had also been a producer on Baker’s 2021 Red Rocket (Baker’s film before 2025 Best Picture Oscar winner Anora), and raved about Simon Rex’s starring performance. That led to his casting in Americana.
And Americana hit on incredibly fortuitous timing with Sweeney: She joined the film after the first season of Euphoria, when she was gaining attention for TV roles but hadn’t yet had the major success of 2023’s Anyone But You, which she starred in and executive produced.
“So she was definitely on the rise, but she hadn’t quite exploded,” says Tost. “Before she kind of exploded as a star, she was like a disappear-into-the-role character actress. It was like, ‘She’s got a star quality — she hasn’t done too many leading roles yet. Maybe we can kind of catch her at the right time.’ Which we did.”
Americana was originally called National Anthem, but it got into SXSW in 2023, the same year as another film called National Anthem — Luke Gilford’s acclaimed feature debut. So Tost changed his title to Americana, which had “always been in the back of my mind.”
At one point, one of Tost’s managers watched a rough cut and shared some feedback about the soundtrack: too much country music.
“And I was like, ‘OK’ — and then I put even more country songs in there. I guess that’s my contrarian nature.”
Though set mostly in South Dakota, the film was shot in New Mexico, which gives it a dreamy, anywhere quality. It takes place in the present day,but also has a timelessness.
“If I get to do a run of movies, I suspect that that’s going to be a weird runner — where they’re set in the modern day, but certain frames or scenes could be from the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s,” says Tost.
Many filmmakers today lament that more people are seeing their films on small screens than in theaters. Of course he’d prefer that people see his movie with a crowd, but Tost accepts the likelihood that more people will watch it on TV: “Hopefully they put the phone down, that’s about the only request I have,” he says.
His gratitude for an audience comes from his years as a poet.
“It’s an art form that I love, but it’s in its cultural afterlife, and it has been for 150 years,” he says. “But if you’re still drawn to it, you’re drawn to it. So that’s where I was — where you’re hoping for, like, 200 readers.”
He spoke with us in the spring, and again at the start of summer, as he looked forward to the release of Americana. He was also looking forward to another road trip, back to one of the states where he went to school.
“We split our time between L.A. and Arkansas,” he says. “My oldest son and I do a drive at the start of each summer from L.A. out to Arkansas, and it’s a highlight of the year… to get out of the L.A. bubble, just as a reminder of how small it is, in a way. That there’s all these other pockets of America out there where there’s stories.”
Americana arrives in theaters Friday, from Lionsgate.
Main image: Paul Walter Hauser as Lefty and Sydney Sweeney as Penny Jo in Americana, written and directed by Tony Tost. Photo by Ursula Coyote/Courtesy of Lionsgate