Any movie with the word "American" in its title that opens with its teenage heroine (Sasha Lane) dumpster diving in order to feed her family can reasonably be counted on to offer a scathing commentary on the cultural and economic ills currently affecting the U.S. And on one level, British writer-director Andrea Arnold's singular, brilliantly immersive road movie American Honey functions as just such a critique.
Shortly after crawling out of the dumpster, Lane's character, Star, is drawn to a wild pack of misfit teens who ride around in a giant van and frighten the zombified masses shopping at a chain department store with an impromptu group dance to Rihanna's "We Found Love." Her flirtation with the group's smoothest talker, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who Star pointedly teases as appearing Trump-esque in his dark suit pants, is enough to convince Star to ditch the alcohol-soaked dysfunction of her home life in favor of taking a chance on this energetic crew's itinerant existence.
The teens get by financially via a carefully worked-out system of breaking off into pairs and going door-to-door pretending to sell magazine subscriptions. They then reunite and give their swindled earnings to Jake's girlfriend and the real power behind the throne, Krystal (Riley Keough, who nearly steals the movie with the specific, subtly damaged toughness that she grants the character). After Star tells Krystal that she disapproves of the lies Jake spins to snag money from suburbanites, Krystal coldly rationalizes to Star that Jake isn't lying--he's simply making money.
It's in this vision of marginalized, lower-class outcasts reaching for success by being just as shady and deceitful as those who occupy the top of the economic food chain that American Honey imparts its sharp take on state-of-the-nation inequality and scavenging. Thankfully, though, Arnold is hardly a didactic filmmaker, and she has fused the gritty realism of her coming-of-age chronicle Fish Tank with the nature-obsessed lyricism of her stunning adaptation of Wuthering Heights to create a primarily experiential film that just happens to have a sociopolitical sting to it. Arnold prefers observing people and places to pushily shouting out the movie's message.
Observation is the key manner in which Arnold and her ingenious director of photography Robbie Ryan (who also collaborated with Arnold on all three of her previous features) convey that America, for all its disillusioning troubles, is still a land of plentiful beauty and hope. This point is made most explicitly in a lovely, Springsteen-scored scene between Star and a sweet-natured truck driver, but it's made most seductively in the cascading flow of nearly tactile visual details that Arnold captures. Every patch of flyover-state land that Krystal's crew travels to offers a bevy of invigorating new sights--wide vistas glimpsed out the van window, beautiful dogs, creepy insects. Even the rot of the string of motels the gang resides in registers as gorgeously authentic. This is "America the beautiful" image-making at its most entrancingly alien.
Arnold's heart proves to be as wide-open as her camera eye. Even though she has moral points to make via her characters, she's too generous to ever veer into full-on "the kids today" moralism. There's a joyousness to the teens' spirited sing-alongs in the packed van, and even Jake, whose cockiness and philandering trysts with Star make him the most potentially repellant character, is ultimately hard not to like. (LaBeouf's charisma has always depended on a motor-mouthed, paradoxically insincere sincerity, which makes him perfectly cast and at his best here.) And most importantly, Arnold's most empathetic embrace is of Star, whose watchful intelligence, brashly tell-it-like-it-is honesty, and youthful impulsiveness is brought to life in a star-making (irresistible pun intended) performance by the assured Lane.
Some may leave American Honey feeling that Star's episodic journey doesn't warrant the film's nearly-three-hour runtime, and that's fine. The expression "not for everyone" certainly applies to Arnold's intentionally rambling, narratively loose approach. But if you find yourself attuned to the movie's exhilarating feast-for-the-senses wavelength, you may find it to be the rare epic that you wish would never end. Grade: A
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