Movie Nation

There have been worse Tarantino rip-offs than “Americana,” a modern Northern Plains Western with hints of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” about it.

And hot starlet of the moment Sydney Sweeney’s not the worst thing in it.

Ok, maybe she is, not quite managing her best shot at playing a stammering shrinking violet waitress with Nashville dreams. But that’s still no reason to bury the film, which is ungainly and sloppily constructed but often watchable.

It’s got greed and big hats and bolo ties and big delusional dreams, cultural appropriation and a patriarchal cult compound and all sorts of armed people willing to kill to get what they want without fearing much in the way of consequences.

So yeah, the title’s on-the-money.

Lower the body count, raise the comic quotient and throw away the out-of-order “Pulp Fiction” story structure and it might have worked.

The writing-directing debut of Tony Tost, who wrote for TV’s “Longmire” and “Damnation,” the picture’s about an “artifact” — a Lakota Sioux “ghost shirt” — and a motley collection of South Dakota strivers who covet it.

There’s the hustler Western museum owner and dealer in “Native artifacts” Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex of “Red Rocket”) who engages lowlife Fun Dave (Joe Adler) and lower-life Dillon (Eric Dane) to steal it.

A Native American militant group led by the Karl Marx-quoting Ghost Eye (Zahn McLarnon) get wind of that robbery.

And a shy, stammering waitress (Sweeney) enlists a lonesome, “slow” combat-vet pony rancher (Paul Walter Hauser of “Naked Gun”) to spy on the robbery plans with an eye towards grabbing that priceless shirt and selling it to make her dreams come true.

Thug Dillon’s Joan Jett-haired girlfriend (Halsey) has her own plans for the shirt and its payout.

But her delusional little boy (Gavin Maddox Bergman), besotted by old Westerns, has decided he’s Chief Sitting Bull reincarnated. What might he do to protect his mom and return that shirt “to my people?”

As the shirt skates off into the sunset in the trunk of Dillon’s rattle-can bright orange ’72 Monte Carlo, the chase is on, with everybody playing the hand they’re dealt and the angles that present themselves to them.

Speaking from experience, I’d say follow that Monte Carlo until it vapor locks, which it sure as shooting will as soon as the engine gets hot enough. But that’d make for a more boring, less bloody movie.

The lightest hearted scenes have McLarnon’s Ghost Shirt reveal that’s not his birth name while lecturing the “reincarnated” kid that “this isn’t exactly the golden age of ‘cultural appropriation'” and just where his “red-faced minstrel” show claims will get young Calvin if runs into less tolerant Lakota than himself.

Attempts to make fun of Hauser’s loneliness and passion for proposing to any single woman he meets fall flat.

And once the heist is on and the rich blowhard (Toby Huss) who has the shirt and his dinner party are interrupted by a home invasion, the picture turns irretrievably violent and whatever sentimental charm was possible vanishes.

The singer Halsey does a decent job with the most interesting character, a woman who’s spent years in classic rock T-shirts and hair, but whose past is a reminder of the sexist Christo-fascist cults all over the West.

Rex is properly vile, Dane his usual white-haired hardcase and Hauser adds another lumpy loser to his collection.

Sweeney doesn’t have to carry this picture, but carrying her weight isn’t easy with a character who starts out a caricature and then breaks from that so severely that we don’t really know who Penny Jo is, just that her mother’s (Harriet Sansom Harris) a generic and bitter dream killer.

The cold-bloodedness of it all suggests a harder-nosed thriller of the “Hell or High Water” school was what Tost had in mind. But he tries to soften that up with sentiment, and the plot and tone never coalesce around that compromise.

In the years since this picture’s premiere, Sweeney has become a hot property, which is why “Americana,” formerly titled “National Anthem,” is worth releasing.

But even Lionsgate knows what they’ve got here doesn’t quite play, which is why they dumped it onto the Island of Misfit Movies — a release date in mid-to-late August.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Halsey, Paul Walter Hauser, Zahn McLarnon, Simon Rex, Gavin Maddox Bergman and Eric Dane.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tony Tost. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47

I can’t remember what project Martin Sheen was promoting when he got into the habit of asking journalists/interviewers to “pray” for his careening, trainwreck of a son, Charlie.

Martin’s the one face we don’t see among those testifying in this “Charlie Sheen, what I did and where I am now” doc.

As we don’t see much in the way of remorse from the “Two and a Half Men/Platoon/Major League/Hot Shots!” star, we understand it. Emilio Estevez is also MIA.

But everybody else that was there in the moment, from Chris Tucker to Denise Richards to Heidi Fleiss, Penn and Cryer, is here for it.

Sept. 10.