American Honey

Utterly absorbing and intensely moving, writer-director Andrea Arnold’s American Honey is one of those big, bold, swing-for-the-fences societal portraits that few filmmakers dare attempt. There’s good reason: Try for a definitive snapshot of a country or a generation, and you risk overreaching or succumbing to pretension. Running nearly three hours, American Honey doesn’t let those concerns get in its way, and the result is the sort of electric audacity that paves over the movie’s occasional wobbles. With Red Road and Fish Tank, Arnold has looked closely at poverty, youth and desperation in her native England. With American Honey, she turns her attention to the United States, and what she finds is a vibrant, troubled, mesmerizing land.

The film stars newcomer Sasha Lane as Star, who is caring for two young children (her boyfriend’s, not hers), somewhere in the South. Dumpster diving, Star radiates the sort of scrappy, raw energy that marks her as someone who’s never had much money and always had to fight for everything she’s gotten. So, it’s fairly obvious why she takes a liking to Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who drives by in a van with a group of young kids. Catching her eye, Jake is a fellow charming survivor, explaining that he’s part of a group that travels cross-country selling magazines door-to-door. Star can’t believe such an operation exists in the 21st century, but Jake swears there’s decent money to be made. Impulsively, she abandons her makeshift family—her boyfriend seems like a redneck cretin, anyway—and runs off to join another.

American Honey very consciously yearns to be an epic road trip, following along with Star and the rest of this ramshackle crew as they drive across the U.S. in a van. They’ll stop in different cities, hoping to convince locals to give them $30 or $40 for a subscription. (Early on, Star is coached by her colleagues, who all seem like they’re from broken homes, to lie if need be: Tell the customer your dad died in the military or that you’ve got some rare disease.) Working with frequent collaborator, cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who shoots the film in boxy Academy ratio), Arnold gives us spare, gorgeous shots of rolling highways and lovely sunsets, making America look like one sprawling landscape of opportunity and possibility. The streets aren’t exactly paved with gold, but you wouldn’t be surprised if they were.

It’s when Star starts meeting her potential customers that we begin to sense the country’s messy, diverse character, and Arnold unapologetically plays up America’s extremes. One house in Kansas City is owned by a Christian family, but considering the way the parents’ tween daughter and her friends dance sexily in the backyard, it’s unclear how pious their offspring really are. When Star’s crew make their way to Texas, she encounters three men who all wear white 10-gallon hats. These people are all stereotypes, but Arnold and her mostly non-professional cast bring them to such rambunctious life that they feel vivacious rather than reductive.

Arnold has often focused on outcasts and those living on the margins, but with American Honey she seems positively entranced by the United States’ kinetic strangeness. Despite the occasional presence of a Confederate flag or other fraught American symbols, the movie actually isn’t that judgmental about the people Star comes across. There is a clear attempt on the filmmaker’s part to provide some sort of exhaustive overview, a time-capsule snapshot, of the nation. What she discovers may be a bit overstated, but it’s unquestionably accurate in its overflowing energy.