A small-town waitress, an unlucky-in-love suitor, a skeevy museum curator and assorted other creatures of the American West collide in "Americana," a hit-or-miss, lightly entertaining Tarantino riff with characters who are more memorable than the scenarios in which they are embroiled.

Sydney Sweeney is endearing as Penny Jo Poplin, a shy waitress in a diner who has big dreams of country music stardom, if only she can fight through the stammer that stunts her speech. She runs into Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), a sweet-natured veteran of the Afghanistan War, who has a habit of proposing to women way too early in their relationship. He's asked for a hand in marriage and been rejected four times already in the course of a year.

Lefty — he's actually right-handed, which typifies writer-director Tony Tost's quirk-forward script — and Penny Jo team up to track down a band of criminals who plan to steal a valuable Native American artifact, a ghost shirt, which is said to contain spiritual powers. It's being lifted by a pair of goons under the employment of Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex), a local museum director who goes about procuring his collection in unethical ways.

Pop singer Halsey is also in the mix as Mandy Starr, who is on the run from her puritanical father, a deranged cultist who enslaves the women in his household, including Mandy's mother and sisters. Mandy winds up with the ghost shirt in the trunk of her orange muscle car, and returns to her father's house for one night of sanctuary, while hoping to pawn off the shirt for a big check.

Mandy also has a son, Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), who believes he's the reincarnation of Sitting Bull, and Zahn McClarnon plays Ghost Eye, a RZA-quoting Native American freedom fighter who doesn't necessarily appreciate Cal's cultural appropriation.

It's a hearty stew that Tost prepares, but his characters all meet up at the world's least exciting standoff, which drags on long into the night and pulls "Americana" down with it. It's the opposite of a powder keg finale, it fizzles, like a firework that's been doused in water.

New Mexico stands in for South Dakota in the story, and Tost captures the desolation in America's dusty, wide-open expanses, where everyone's dreams are waiting for them in some other part of the country, no matter how they get there, if only they can get there.

Tost has a knack for writing characters and his actors bring them to vivid life — Sweeney and Hauser are especially touching as two drifting souls whose orbits smash into one another — but "Americana" flames out when it should be lighting up. It's a sweet ballad looking for a better chorus.

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'AMERICANA'

GRADE: C+

MPA rating: R (for violence, language throughout and some sexual references)

Running time: 1:47

How to watch: In theaters

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