Film Review: American Honey

Clocking in at nearly three hours, American Honey offers us an extensive vision of contemporary America from the backseat of a minivan.
Beautifully and precisely directed by Andrea Arnold, it features shots of stretched-out highways, toy-house suburbs and endless streams of gas station stops with junk food restaurants, all punctuating a sun-drenched, insect-infested, oil-slurped countryside. This is the land that 18-year-old Star (Sasha Lane) steps out onto when she runs away from her home in Oklahoma. Falling for the charm of Jake (Shia LaBeouf), she packs her bags and travels with a raggle-taggle band of millennials/magazine salespeople who help her on her journey to finding herself, while also apparently operating 2016’s hottest iTunes playlist.
Quickly getting embroiled in a messy love triangle with Jake and boss Crystal (Riley Keough), Star discovers that behind the hedonism of endless, careless roadtripping there’s a price to pay. Her new friends turn into pitiable, dishonest figures in an effort to ply bland magazines on the doorsteps of the American middle-classes, selling themselves to make a buck for their domineering boss. Star yearns for something truer.
There’s some initial character and plot-building here, but the movie’s broad scope means it doesn’t hit all its marks by the very end. Rounded conclusions are sacrificed for vague, picaresque musical montages, in-car singalongs and kumbaya fire dances, which all create an annoyingly unsatisfying finale.
But despite the setbacks, Arnold’s magnificent direction and shining performances from Lane and LeBeouf keep this film entertaining even when it begins to drag. In particular, a passionate sex scene between the two main characters is filmed with the camera positioned so that it’s poking through stalks of grass, and the effect is hugely gratifying. From every angle in this scene (and, indeed, throughout the entire film), attention is given to the earthy intimacy of lives lived treading the soil and traversing the roads of America.