There is a whiff of grandiosity about this crime drama’s title, hinting at ambitions to say something a little bigger than usual for a movie about cowboys and Indigenous Americans concerning cultural identities and appropriation, the legacy of the old west, and so on. It doesn’t quite lasso the bronco, but the ambitions of writer-director Tony Tost’s yarn are ambitious and interesting, and he has at least assembled a cracking cast to tell it.
Audiences will probably be most excited about the presence of star-billed Sydney Sweeney, here playing Penny Jo, a sweet waitress with a stammer, although Sweeney is very much part of an ensemble that distributes screen time democratically. (The film premiered in 2023 at South by Southwest, but is only coming out now, perhaps because Sweeney has now become a legit phenomenon.) At the New Mexico middle-of-nowhere diner where Penny Jo slings hash, she stumbles on a plot to steal a rare Lakota artefact from a collector (Toby Huss, making the most of a cameo role).
This calfskin MacGuffin becomes of interest to a number of other parties, including: antiquities dealer Roy (Simon Rex from Red Rocket); Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), a little kid who thinks he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull, and Cal’s damaged mother Mandy (Halsey), the survivor of a patriarchal cult/ family; sad but none-too-bright cowboy Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser), who grows sweet on Penny Jo; and indigenous revolutionary Ghost Eye (the always wondrous Zahn McClarnon from Reservation Dogs), who is apt to quote Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx when not committing crimes.
The chronologically scrambled chapter structure, so in vogue these days (see, for instance, Weapons) sets everything up for a big showdown that is mildly anticlimactic in action movie terms, but presumably was all the budget permitted. Also, Tost’s screenplay is not afraid to deploy the odd hokey line or genre cliche, and that includes what feels like half a dozen camera setups harkening back to the last shot of The Searchers, just to drive home the point. But McClarnon’s wry reservation intellectual, and most of the other colourful turns, makes this eminently watchable.