The Wild West looks tame beside the lawless, senseless Continental plains and sierras of "Heads or Tails?," an enjoyably off-kilter Euro-western that honors the stylistic and structural traditions of the genre while occupying its own reality entirely. The second feature from Italian directing duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis features a rogue outlaw cowboy, a gutsy, pistol-toting widow and Buffalo Bill Cody himself — all variously on the loose in a suitably parched stretch of northern Italy. But if those sound like standard ingredients for an old-school oater, or even a Leone-era spaghetti joint, thissui generisitem takes a turn for the eccentric even before it pivots into outright surrealism. One of the more irreverent titles at this year's Cannes festival — where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard strand — "Heads or Tails?" is looser and loopier than de Righi and Zoppis' cultish 2021 festival hit "The Tale of King Crab," which was already plenty playful. An elegantly rustic fable, that film leaned on the pair's documentary background as it gathered regional lore and translated it into fanciful cinematic fiction. Their follow-up retains that interest in the shaggy, variable nature of folkloric storytelling, down to a framing device that presents the events on screen as dictated by Cody to a dogged personal secretary. And as played by a brash, blustering John C. Reilly — inspired casting that will boost distributor interest in this bilingual Italo-American production — the historic showman is here fashioned as the least reliable of narrators. More from Variety Could Richard Linklater's 'Nouvelle Vague' Get France Its First Oscar for Best International Feature in Over Three Decades? Kino Lorber Acquires North American Rights to Fatih Akin's Coming-of-Age Cannes Drama 'Amrum' (EXCLUSIVE) 'Drunken Noodles' Review: A Breezy, Summery Ode to Casual Sex and Embroidered Erotica The American icon is introduced far from his home frontier, touring his famed traveling rodeo circus around Europe (playing itself, in a break from spaghetti-western tradition, rather than approximating the American desert) at the turn of the 20th century. The story is spurred by a real-life incident, when Cody's men were challenged by a group of cattle-herding Italianbutterito a kind of cowboy duel — handily won by the latter, from whom alphabutteroAugusto Imperioli emerged as a local folk hero. In the film's version of events, Imperioli becomes Santino ("The Eight Mountains" star Alessandro Borghi), a swaggeringly handsome and dumb-as-rocks stockman who wins the contest — and in turn, a healthy sum for gambling Italian nobleman Rupè (Mirko Artuso), who bet Cody the home team would prevail. At the same time, Santino catches the wandering eye of Rupè's young wife Rosa (rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who desperately wants out of her abusive trophy marriage. One close-range bullet later, Rupè is dead while Rosa and Santino flee into the wilderness, with a hefty price on the triumphant rider's head — and Cody, opportunistically turned bounty hunter, in not-so-hot pursuit. It's here that the film's interest in legend-building comes narratively into play, as Santino embraces his sudden new status as outlaw and class warrior, all for a crime he can't honestly claim to have committed. A rollicking musical sequence in which he boasts of his own ill-earned reputation is a high point in a film that repeatedly weaves song into its tapestry of tale-spinning — accentuated by the stark, naive strumming and plucking of Vittorio Giampietro's score — with Cody often editorializing proceedings with his own hearty crooning. (Reilly, never reluctant to show off his musical chops, also contributes original compositions.) Amid this clash of inflated, self-mythologizing male egos, it's Rosa who acts most intrepidly, to no great acclaim. It was ever thus. While Reilly, amusingly playing Cody as a cod-poetic blowhard, gets to do the most flamboyant scenery-chewing, it's Tereszkiewicz and Borghi who shoulder the bulk of the film as runaway lovers bound by little more than a passing, fatal whim. Both fully look the part of their respective genre archetypes — Borghi especially, with his sky-blue scowl and sandy stubble, was born to do at least one Italian horse opera in his career — while their performances undercut those expectations from the inside out. Borghi's cowboy is all hollow puff and wilting resolve, while Tereszkiewicz plays Rosa neither as feisty dame nor damsel in distress: Instead she's terse and guarded, even when shooting a man's testicles off with fearsome precision. Rosa's quiet nerve equips her better than other characters for a thoroughly unhinged final act, which shifts the register from folk tale to adult fairytale, in which regular rules of life, death and reason no longer apply. This shift into more fantastical terrain leaves the traditionally lean human dynamics of the western far behind, and may divide audiences. Yet "Heads or Tails?" pulls it off, in large part because the scrubby, sunbaked textures of its story world remain so vividly consistent. Shooting mostly on film of varying stock, DP Simone D'Arcangelo authentically honors both the tawny beauty of the film's real-life landscape and the earthy severity of the continent-mixing Leone-land that inspired de Righi and Zoppis — and even serves up some of the blushing, saturated Campari sunsets of more romanticized Hollywood westerns, minus any true heroes to ride off into them. 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