Film Review: Americana

In which much blood is shed over a shirt

There’s an old joke that after anything bad happens in America, some wisecrack will remark that it’s almost as if the country were built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Americans, like settlers everywhere, like to pretend that the genocide that birthed their country either didn’t happen or was a side note in the heroic tale of manifest destiny, which made possible either a white nationalist ethnostate (for conservatives) or a multicultural land of tolerance (for liberals). The Western genre is in one way or another a reckoning with this, a glorification or a condemnation but always an attempt to make sense of it. Such a formula has been once again modernized by Tony Tost in his 2023 film, released in cinemas in 2025, Americana.

Like many classic westerns this is a crime movie, with desperate people all needing something, for reasons good or ill, all hunting down a single object. The plot could be viewed as a chained heist film, with people chasing other people whilst being chased by still other people. The object in question is a ghost shirt of the Lakota people from the age of the Ghost Dance in the late 19th century, a spiritual rebellion against American rule. It is deeply sacred to the Lakota, a group of whom are prominent in this film, and also worth a lot of money to white people.

This film boasts an impressive cast. Sydney Sweeney is completely unrecognizable as Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress who learns of the heist, and has dreams of being a musician in Nashville. Halsey plays Mandy Starr, the ex-girlfriend of one of the men who ends up starting this whole shebang, and the mother of a son, Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman) who is witness to an act of great violence and is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Zahn McClarnon plays the leader of a Lakota radical group seeking to reclaim the ghost shirt for their people. He has the right combination of intensity and chill to him for such a role, capable of being empathetic to a small child and quoting Karl Marx in his tirades against what white America has done to his nation. Of particular note that McClarnon is himself Hunkpapa Lakota; you can tell he knows the pain his character feels deeply and personally.

There is a character I am deeply conflicted about: Lefty Ledbetter, as played by Paul Walter Hauser (an actor who is having a good summer, between this film, his role as Ed Hocken Jr. in the new Naked Gun, and Mole Man in the new Fantastic Four). He is introduced asking Penny Jo Poplin for her opinion on the speech he will use to propose marriage to the woman he has been seeing for only a few dates. Cards on the table: I am autistic, and I despise cringe comedy. My life is filled with awkward moments that end with people disliking me; I find humor based on such situations to be viscerally unpleasant. Maybe he’s just socially awkward, but I can’t help but read his character as something of a caricature, and to be particularly caustic, a caricature of autistic people. I cannot know if Tony Tost meant him that way, but several jokes involving him rankled me. To Tost’s credit, he improves markedly as the film goes on and you get a better sense of his humanity, and a scene near the end is legitimately heart-rending.

White people have often treated the American West, comparatively less dense than the East and also the cities on the West Coast, as sort of a blank slate, an opportunity to build whatever they want. Such is the Christian cult featured in the film’s third act, where Mandy is revealed to have grown up. The women are silent in the presence of men, and all wear long dresses. They cannot wear makeup, and they cannot have phones. They are ruled with an iron fist by Hiram Starr, Mandy’s father, played with appropriate menace by Christopher Kriesa. But even so, you get the feeling that he and the other men in this bigoted little hovel in Wyoming are not strong, not virile, not the masters of their fate. This whole microcosm of Christian Nationalist patriarchy ends up looking like a way for emotionally stunted men to avoid ceasing to be emotionally stunted, and they are willing to make the lives of women living hell so they can continue to play god. When the whole thing falls apart spectacularly, you will cheer.

I also appreciated the way that the film portrayed this Lakota radical group. They are neither simple savages of the classic Western film, nor are they blinkered radicals along the lines of the namesake group in The Baader Meinhof Complex (a stunning film from 2008 about leftist radicals in 1970s West Germany). And neither are they cuddly caricatures, positive representations of nonwhite peoples with no flaws, no rough edges - and no personalities. These are rugged, rough men who deeply love their people, and are willing to kill for it (and they are quite good at killing for it). They came off to me as very realistic, very believable revolutionaries, if only on a small scale. They know that revolution is not a dinner party, to quote Mao Zedong. And, when confronted with the white world with all its maddening misunderstandings of their culture, they can be both very kind and very cold (such as one piercing scene at the end - you both feel that what McClarnon’s character does is wrong, but you also understand deeply why he did what he did).

The Lakota characters, McClarnon’s in particular, are also great foils for Cal Starr, the white child who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, for those unaware, was the nineteenth century war leader of the Lakota people who led his nation’s war of survival against the United States. He is a perfect personification of how settler colonies try to indigenize themselves, to claim a historic connection with the land they occupy that they simply do not have, not unlike the white men in faux indigenous garb who threw British tea into Boston Harbor at the eve of the Revolution. This child, submerged in the currents of history that he cannot comprehend due to his youth, has the fortune of coming across actual Lakota, and the film milks this peculiar juxtaposition for all it is worth. But he is not merely a comic character; he goes through a lot of pain in this violence, and by the end you just want to hug him.

Americana is a panoramic view of the contemporary American West, with all the cruelties that simmer beneath its bucolic, utopian presentation. This is a film about how the past is never past, and how it can come shooting into the present with all the force of a speeding bullet. There is a violence here that erupts into the lives of the characters very suddenly and without remorse - which is not at all unlike the violence that created the American West as we know it. The end result is a thrilling, somewhat pulpy crime drama that is both great fun and deeply thought-provoking.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Book Review: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones’ latest novel delivers on the promise of the title with a historical, fantastical spray of blood.

Since I heard the concept of this novel last year, it’s been one of my most highly anticipated titles. For regular readers of Nerds, you may have noticed that some books I was excited about didn’t quite land the way I hoped—not so with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. This fast-paced story within a story of an Indigenous vampire hunting the buffalo hunters was exactly the kind of gory read I wanted in these troubling times. 

The basic idea of the book is mostly summed up in the title: Good Stab accidentally becomes a vampire and decides to hunt down white hunters as they eradicate the buffalo herds for profit. Jones delivers on the plot’s promise of revenge, but the novel isn’t so one-dimensional as that. First, the novel is a frame narrative. Nearly failed academic Etsy Beaucarne thinks she’s struck gold when she is able to transcribe, and hopefully publish, the journal of her distant relative Arthur Beaucarne. In his journal, Beaucarne has recorded the story of a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, where he explains how he became a vampire and hunted down the hunters. This frame narrative sets up not only the extractive nature of higher education when it comes to Indigenous topics but the idea of audience as Good Stab tells his story to a white man in order to achieve his goal. This idea of audience reaches beyond the novel, asking whom are these stories for? 

While Jones has been recognized in and outside of the horror genre as a top-tier writer, this layered frame narrative really demonstrates his control of voice. His ability to shift between Beaucarne’s journal entries and Good Stab’s “oral” story never felt jumbled. Both characters were clearly delineated, their voices unique especially when in contrast to the other. 

This emphasis on voice is particularly important to how Jones takes on the time-honored horror of the vampire. In the novel’s acknowledgements, Jones talks about starting this novel while wrapping up a graduate seminar course on “Writing the Vampire,” which is reflected in the way he picks and chooses what aspects of vampire lore to include, such as the quick healing abilities but not the lack of reflection. Good Stab keeps track of his reflection and the changes made by being a vampire because these new powers and restrictions make him unable to participate in the lifestyle that he sees as making him a Blackfeet. What makes one Indigenous is a throughline in this novel as Good Stab must come to terms with the changes his abilities bring as he is no longer able to go back to his home or his family and friends. 

While this book is deeply character driven via Good Stab’s voice, it is also a violent tale of revenge against the American empire. As Good Stab says: “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I am the worst dream America ever had.” The novel’s plot begins with a white man found skinned on the prairie. Good Stab comes to the Lutheran pastor Beaucarne to tell his tale as the reader slowly figures out why Beaucarne is his chosen audience. While described on the inside flap as “literary horror,” the more literary aspects of the prose and frame narrative never get in the way of the blood and gore, but rather make the moments of intense violence more poignant or shocking.  

There’s so much more I could write about with this novel—the environmental commentary, the use of oral storytelling, the fun reinterpretation of the vampire—but this novel is my current top read of 2025. I’d rather leave you with a taste in hopes that you pick it up for yourself. Gabino Iglesias was right when he called this novel Jones’ “masterpiece” in his review for NPR. The prose, the characters, the plot, the commentary all come together seamlessly to create a book nearly impossible to put down. Good Stab’s voice will stay with me for a long time, and I know this is only the first of many rereads. 

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Reference: Jones, Stephen Graham. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter [Saga Press, 2025].

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

Review: Killers of the Flower Moon

Scorsese's bloody, brutal, sprawling dive into the core of America

It feels almost pompous of me to attempt to review a Martin Scorcese movie. I mean, It’s Martin Scorsese! He’s one of the greatest directors in the history of film! I, on the other hand, am certainly no Roger Ebert. In some sense, it’s arrogant even; who would want my thoughts on a Martin Scorsese? I’m some guy in the Virginia suburbs of DC with an email job? But I feel compelled to; I sat in that theater for three and a half hours, and, like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, it barely felt its length, so enthralled I was.

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, released in 2014. I finished reading the book maybe an hour and a half before driving to the theater, and it was good to have all that in my mind so freshly. The book itself is a brisk read, rivaling the nonfiction work of Erik Larson, best known for The Devil in the White City about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the murders of H. H. Holmes, in its seamless blend of grandeur and intimacy, as well as its spellbinding prose. There are several little details in the book that Scorsese faithfully renders in the film, giving the proceedings ever more verisimilitude for those who have read just shy of three hundred pages of the history. I would recommend the experience (but perhaps don’t rush yourself as much as I did).

The book and film both concern the Osage Murders, the significance of which requires some explanation. The Osage Nation is an indigenous people who, by the eighteenth century, lived in what is now parts of Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas. But, as the Stars and Stripes ravaged its way westward, planting white settlers in the ashes of the peoples it had extorted, expelled, or exterminated, they were sent to live in Indian Territory. But, being America, whites simply were not sated with the depopulation of the rest of the continent, and as such they began storming into what would soon be admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma. But, as luck would have it, the land that the Osage had settled on happened to be sitting over the smelly, oozy slime that would power the twentieth century: oil.

Because of somewhat arcane legal reasons, the whites who wanted to drill into the plains of Oklahoma had to pay the Osage who lived there, as they had the mineral rights by law. As such, in the early twentieth century many Osage became fantastically wealthy, even having white servants (a stupefyingly rare thing in a society ruled by white supremacy as national ideology). It is in this topsy-turvy roaring twenties boomtown that a series of shocking and mysterious murders rocked Osage country, the state of Oklahoma, and the United States as a whole (this was the age of ballyhoo, after all), all targeting rich Osage or people closely tied to them. Such is the bloody, unusual panorama that Grann wrote about and Scorsese filmed. I had never heard of this before reading the book; it almost feels like something out of the alternate history I love, like a Native American version of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Right from the beginning, Scorsese knows that this whole situation is so very different from what Americans think they know about the indigenous peoples of the country, or the 1920s, or Oklahoma. The first hour or so of the film revels in immersing you in this setting, this topsy-turvy upheaval of American ideology, and fills it with period flare. The cars are beautifully redone, in particular, with a glamor that is doubtlessly part simple distance of time since cars looked like that, but more because of the wealth of this land, and of the people who had made the best out of their ethnic cleansing. The dances look right for the period, and there is enough big band jazz to get your toes tapping in the theater. Perhaps most stunning to me was the refusal to let the Osage characters speak in stereotypical ‘indian’ voices; rather, they all talk with drawls of varying thickness, which is odd to hear from those in traditional costume, but then you remember you are, after all, in Oklahoma, and it all makes sense.

The showing I went to had a recorded message from Scorsese played before the actual film. Part of it was him thanking the audience for showing up to a physical theater to watch the film (reminding me, surprisingly, of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which is practically night and day when juxtaposed with this film), but part of it was about how much support came from the Osage Nation in the current day. Through the film, there’s the subtle je ne sais quoi that tells your gut that this is not just a white man’s fantasy. The culture of the Osage, almost annihilated, flourishes on-screen, lovingly recreated. Scorsese has talked about how the film was changed from focusing on Federal agent Tom White (played here by Jesse Plemmons) to something more focused on the Osage themselves, at the advice from the people of that nation he consulted. From what I can tell, every Osage character (and one non-Osage indigenous character) are all played by Native American actors. Scorsese demonstrates a level of care here that many lesser white directors would simply eschew for convenience’s sake. He is smart enough, and more importantly empathetic enough, to bring forth the rich culture of these people, and show the killings as the murderous white aberration that they truly were.

The cast is sprawling, as historical epics like these so often have (take Scorsese’s The Irishman as another example), but the story is propelled, more than anyone else, by its three leads: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone. It is the tension, the love, the hate, the greed, and the desperation that binds these three characters together, the three that form the whirring, raging dynamo that leaves so many dead in its wake.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, just out of the Army after fighting in France, here to take up an offer from his uncle William King Hale (De Niro). Both are not what you’d expect from each actor; both are villainous, revoltingly so by the end of the film. DiCaprio, ever the suave, confident leading man, is here a man who is in the thralls of a superior, who is divided in no small part due to his loyalty, and his sense of obligation, to his uncle, the man who brought him here and is in the process of making him filthy, stinking rich. De Niro was almost unrecognizable as Hale, and, having not paid too much attention to the trailers or the posters, I was not entirely sure it was him until the end credits, so good the makeup is. Perhaps more surprisingly, you will behold Robert De Niro delivering his lines in a thick Southern drawl, which I never expected. De Niro’s roles have certainly been more sinister, on average, than DiCaprio’s (his outing as a flamboyant pirate in the film adaptation of Stardust notwithstanding, an addition not present in the book that nevertheless improved the experience immensely), but here he is not a mobster, for a mobster is a thief who acts outside of polite society. Here, he is the sort of thief who constitutes polite society, who defines what ‘politeness’ and ‘professional’ and ‘common sense’ are, in a society with land theft at its bedrock, with a supposed gentility and generosity masking an utter rapaciousness, a sinister duality befitting an antebellum plantation baron.

But as famous as DiCaprio and De Niro are, the truly standout performance is Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman who grew up in black gold-induced splendor. She starts off with a haughtiness, a princess-like hauteur to her, as she gazes down on her dominion, seeing the white men who she to some degree controls and who to some degree control her. She seems almost aware of how utterly bizarre she is, a survivor of a continental apocalypse who nevertheless reigns over the destroyers, reveling in the irony as well as the more quotidian perquisites of wealth. But as the ravages of the murders rock her town and her family, the self-assuredness begins to slowly crack. She becomes a metaphor for the brief Osage ascendancy herself, collapsing under the crushing weight of manifest destiny, the sine qua non of the American national project.

Mollie is, naturally, somewhat taken aback at Ernest’s romantic advantages; why would a rich woman like her countenance a man like him? But they eventually swoon for each other, her wit and beauty enchanting him, his gung-ho confidence enchanting her. But the fact that she is orders of magnitude wealthier than him is not lost on either of them. Their relationship is genuinely loving, at least at first, and the two care for each other in sickness and in health. Mollie is sick, and increasingly so; she is diabetic in a time when the newest stunning wonder drug is this Canadian discovery called insulin, which is sent to her all the way from the true north strong and free, injected by doctors and then her husband. But Ernest is torn between his legitimate love for her and his addiction to money, the greatest American addiction, egged along by his uncle who loves nothing else.

Whoever wrote the First Epistle to Timothy (historians are agreeing ever more that whoever they were, it wasn’t the Apostle Paul) had a pearl of great wisdom:

“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

1 Timothy 6:10 (King James version)

It is the love of, the thirst for, the addiction to money that drives this film, this bloodshed, this rolling massacre. It is that greed that made America, for it was a business venture that planted the first English colonists in Jamestown and brought the first Black slaves to Virginia’s shores in 1619. But it is not just money, in its raw form, not merely accounting tables and bank statements. It was the caste system, called ‘race,’ by Spaniards and eagerly adopted by the rest of the European world, that was used as the cement holding the bricks of American enterprise together, that was upturned so utterly by the fantastic wealth of the Osage, whose luck in finding that oil rivaled that of Europe, who found the Americas to plunder before the rest of the world did.

So much racist propaganda is dedicated to pushing the notion that white supremacy is natural, inevitable, the natural order of things, and that anything else is at best a brief aberration and at worst a crime against nature. The Osage’s lucky break is living, breathing proof that such a social order is not inevitable, that Manifest Destiny was not written into the law of the universe, that an alternative is possible. That is one of the key thrusts of Killers of the Flower Moon, that the American national ideology is not the only way of living, the only way of being, the only possible arrangement of fortune.

‘Triumph’ feels like too light a word for Killers of the Flower Moon. In some ways, it feels like one of the great historical epics of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but it knows not to play into worn white supremacist tropes, so it feels strikingly, refreshingly modern. It is the rare film that earns a runtime of over three hours, and it is a hell of a ride. Now, if it only had an intermission, it would be perfect.

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The Math  

Highlights: The whole thing. You can't make me choose a single aspect.

Nerd Coefficient: 11/10

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.