American Honey is a film of multiple contradictions. At once a strikingly modern road movie about lost youth in contemporary America, it’s also filled with the deep cynicism and dread of late 60s and 70s cinema. Partly a meditation on the corruption of the American dream, it’s also an ode to the resilience of youth in the face of dire situations and bad luck. At times a stylish and engrossing piece of vérité filmmaking, it’s also an overlong and indulgent slog.
The film tells the story of Star (Sasha Lane) a teenage girl who, when we first meet her, is caring for two young children (possibly her siblings) in a rundown house while their absentee mother spends her nights line dancing at the local watering hole. Tired of the squalid conditions, empty fridge, and drunken advances of her mother’s boyfriend, Star is understandably taken with the smooth-talking suspender-wearing Jake (Shia LeBeouf) when she sees him in a Walmart. With Jake and his crew of wild, runaway teens, Star sees an opportunity to escape her dead-end life and start anew. After an ominous interview with the crew’s cultish leader Krystal (Riley Keough) Star is allowed into the fold, and heads off across the country selling magazine subscriptions door to door.
Director Andrea Arnold delivers a startlingly realistic look at poverty in the American heartland, beginning her film with a pathos-laden gut punch strong enough to provide plenty of goodwill as the film meanders through its story. As Star and the gang hop from town to town, Star begins to fall for Jake, who courts her like a school yard crush – putting her in headlocks and giving her gifts. LeBouef is equal parts engaging and repulsive as the group’s second-in-command Jake,who struts like a rooster amongst the other teens but is reduced to a snivelling whelp at a disapproving look from Krystal. It’s a gutsy performance, and you get the feeling that he’s attempting a similar character move to that of James Franco in Spring Breakers, however the film’s complete lack of a sense of humour makes the performance come off more painfully forced than revelatory.
That’s especially true in light of Sasha Lane’s easy naturalism as Star. The debut film for the young actress, Lane plays it safe and lets Arnold’s camera do the work. Though the film is a coming of age tale of sorts, most of Star’s growth goes unstated, communicated simply by Arnold’s camera returning again and again to her skeptical face, leaving us to surmise what’s going on in her mind. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Star approaches a house to sell magazines, only to find a startling reminder of the life she tried to leave behind: a young boy and girl living in filth as their drugged-out mother wanders through the rooms like a zombie.
Arnold’s ability to capture these moments without comment, and present them in a simultaneously cinematic and realistic style, lends them morbid beauty and a deep pathos. American Honey is a stirring vision of the American heartland – a gritty, hard-scrabble maze of freeways and box stores filled (one imagines) with gun nuts and Trump supporters. It speaks to the writer/director’s talents that it also seems to exist in some strange middle ground between love-letter and cynical indictment.
Unfortunately for all of Arnold’s talents, at 163 minutes the film wears on your patience. There are at least eight scenes of Star sitting in the crowded van as the group of kids sing along with the radio or chatter away in near-indecipherable dialogue. And even though we follow this gang of outcasts through countless days of rich suburban streets, and nights of grimy motel rooms, we hardly learn a thing about anyone except Star and Jake. When the film finally reaches it’s conclusion it comes with the dual relief and exhaustion of completing an epic poem: you’re glad you read it, but feel like by the end, your concentration was waining. Though worth its grandest moments, American Honey will try the patience of all but the most devoted film lovers.
