John C. Reilly is taking Buffalo Bill to Rome. In Heads or Tails?, the Italian Western from Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, Reilly plays the showman as he arrives in the city with his troupe of cowboys, ready to entertain and, as the film quickly makes plain, to be tested.
The test comes from Ercole Rupè, who challenges Buffalo Bill to a bet over which set of cowboys is best. That wager sets the film in motion, and it is the sort of premise that makes Reilly’s casting feel less like stunt work than a return to a persona he has been building for years: the offbeat American performer who can move between comedy, music and something stranger. Reilly, known to many as the Walk Hard star and as a live musician, was apparently given plenty of room to shape Buffalo Bill himself.
Heads or Tails? is set in the early 1900s, but it is not interested in tidy period realism. It is being framed as a serio-comic western with surreal and quirky turns, the kind of film where a challenge over cowboys can sit beside something much more unruly. The comparison that keeps coming up is The Sisters Brothers, another Western that leaned into oddness and dry humor rather than genre purity. That is the lane Heads or Tails? appears to be aiming for, with Reilly once again at the center of an American-western story filtered through a very different sensibility.
And then the film swerves. Rupe’s fiancée Rosa shoots him, and Rosa and Santino go on the run together. A decapitation does not shut down their romance. Those are not background details; they are the film’s way of making clear that Heads or Tails? is not playing by ordinary Western rules. One of the quoted lines in the film captures that mood: “A horse knows a liar without even seeing a man.” Another moves in a more political direction with “They killed the son of the old master,…”, before a sharper burst of language lands with “all the motherf*cking oligarchs.”
Reilly once described the appeal of Buffalo Bill in a line that fits the role neatly: “Being the hero of your own story just like Buffalo Bill.” That is the idea Heads or Tails? seems to chase, too — a western built around self-mythology, absurdity and violence, with Reilly carrying the performance as if he were born to do exactly that. For a player who was already mixing country, comedy and performance back in 2013 at a gig in St Andrews in the Square, the part looks less like a detour than the next step in a long, strange run.
What matters now is that Heads or Tails? is not just another Western on a list. It is another offbeat John C. Reilly western, and one that appears willing to let him make Buffalo Bill larger, weirder and more human than the history books ever did.
