Director Andrea Arnold chronicles the modernistic American dream, in “American Honey”. Star (Sasha Lane) is an adolescent girl from a troubled home, rebelling to make something more of her boredom. She runs away with a traveling sales crew who drive across the American Midwest selling subscriptions door to door. Finding her feet in this gang of teenagers, one of whom is a love interest named Jake (Shia LaBeouf), she soon gets into the group’s lifestyle of hard-partying nights, law-bending days, and young love. It’s a fast moving, ever-changing scenery of guns, drugs and the turn of adulthood. “American Honey” is rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, adult language throughout, and drug/alcohol abuse all involving teens.
Arnold’s vision of a whirlwind representation for the very youth she is depicting is one of gritty surrealism that is unapologetic for the way she sees these endangered species. In “American Honey”, the world is a very nasty place that doesn’t feel exaggerated or overcooked in any way what so ever. The world that is being visualized in this movie is exactly the same as the one we neglect to discover out there, simply because we haven’t taken the journeys down the dark paths that our characters do. This is an uncompromising view at modern day entrepreneurship. The gimmick in this movie being that these kids are recruited at such an early age to leave home and sell magazine subscriptions in search of riches. Being someone whose first job was exactly this, I can tell you that every opportunity that Arnold capitalizes on to paint the very visceral nature of this dog-eat-dog world that these kids scam out of the unwise public they sell to. With our journey being entirely that of Star, we see a transformation in her that relays to the audience the dire importance of her situation to make something of herself fast before she becomes just another statistic. It’s one that’s educational as well as chilling for just how far these youths are willing to subject themselves.
My problem with this story comes in the material that doesn’t always take the most satisfying of ways to accurately depict a situation. For the first half of this movie, we are literally littered with this love relationship between Star and Jake, and everything else takes a backseat. Because this is a movie that offers very little backstory exposition, we are left to fill in the blanks on why these characters subject themselves to such stupid decisions. Uneducated youth I guess?? I couldn’t care less about their relationship because I noticed how toxic it was to the other person. Then something changed in the second half of the movie that made this arc stand at the very forefront of importance moving forward. Call it superb acting from the two committed actors who head this movie, but I think the blame lies more with the script taking their love in the direction of everything else falling down around them, and just how valuable they become to each other to fight back against things that are out of their control. I really did start to open my eyes to not only the chemistry of Lebeouf and Lane, but also the interchangeable turmoil that resolved in great empathy for both characters.
Speaking of performances, they are outstanding in this movie. I will get to some more of my negatives for the movie later, but what keeps it afloat is Lane’s precision to mature before our very eyes against the backdrop of a world that only has bad intentions for her. Star’s moral choices casts a shadow of great disappointment with the audience, but she is the voice of reason against many of this kids in this scam that are too far in to ever see the sun again. This is Lane’s first major acting role, and I think it’s more than an assumption to assure you that she took this role as far as possible. Lane’s Star builds a volcano of bubbling emotional depth that blows like the storm after the calm, and she really impressed me in this movie. For those who know me know I also don’t often give credit to Shia Lebeouf, but in the last ten years he has continued to floor me in the wide range of character roles that he accepts. Jake is the kind of character who definitely seems to good to be true to the protagonist we are looking out for, who is so romantically smitten by him. You always wait for the other shoe to drop for this wild card, but surprisingly the movie took some interesting and unpredictable turns in story that was constantly one step ahead of me. Lebeouf dazzles in a role that he has quietly been building to over the last ten years, and hopefully it’s one that might garner him some minor award consideration.
The soundtrack which is mostly rap and top 40 pop dominated play such an integral role in establishing the attitude within each scene. It does feel slightly conventional at times, but I’m a sucker for a movie that knows when and where to use musical composition within its movie, and the usage here is nothing short of brilliant. The hardcore rap with all of its lyrically visceral nature is showcased of scenes in the van, with the children singing along. The importance here is to see these young men and women using such foul language, relaying to the audience their desire to mature before society or their lost parents would like them to. Rihanna’s “We Found Love” is played to the way the lyrics were envisioned; throughout an unhealthy romantic relationship that was started in the worst of lies. All of these extra creative touches in audio bliss go the extra mile to sample some of the most mind-addictive tracks of the last few years, and it adds a slice of authentic modern day youth that any young adult will find it easier to relate to because of it.
For those who don’t know, this movie has a run time of just shy of three hours. Whenever I get the occasional movie being that long in length, I think if anything can be deducted from the story without it compromising the very foundation of the plot at hand. I look at the pacing of spreading these stories and subplots as thin as humanly possible, and wonder if they would flow better without pointless filler. Both of these are unfortunately the case here, and why this movie will eventually be rated so low for me. The pacing in this movie is torturous, losing me about midway through, when I started to check my phone frequently. It’s not that the story isn’t exciting but more in the effect that they don’t know when to cut something. Scenes drag on for far too long, creating many moments of bridged tension that would flow so much smoother if the editing was more hands on. So much can be cut from just the barrage of characters gazing into the sky or any backdrop around them, creating many speedbumps on the road to cohesive clarity.
“American Honey” proves that everyone is selling something. Some people just know how to hide the negatives and the positives, a concept that the movie’s drawn out screenplay derails on repeatedly. However, the merit of two beautifully synchronized leading performances, as well as the refreshing and gritty revealing look inside a world that is waiting for our babies to grow up, makes Andrea Arnold’s first directing effort in five years a worthy recommend. Just bring a Snickers. You might not be going anywhere for a long time.
7/10