Fearless, uncompromising, and shocking, American Honey exposes the harsh underbelly of the elusive American
dream. This swerving road adventure is energized with a youthful exuberance for
life and a hopeful future while living on the seedy edge of an amoral
lifestyle.
It’s the Easy Rider
for millennials; an unflinching and mesmerizing odyssey that follows Star
(Sasha Lane), a gutsy teenage girl fed up with babysitting the young children
of irresponsible parents who spend their time drinking at the local bar, when
she flees her impoverished home to join a ragtag group of misfit runaway kids
who ‘work hard’ scamming and robbing their way from town to town as they travel
across Middle America in a van selling magazine subscriptions.
Andrea Arnold, the British director of the acclaimed film Fish Tank (2009), also about a teenage
girl coming of age in working class Essex housing projects while witnessing the
struggles of her single mother eking out a living by prostitution and drugs,
was herself the product of years of living off welfare and scraping by while
feeding her children. Here Arnold turns her eye on the American equivalent of lost
aimless youth.
Using a mostly non-professional cast of actors who are utterly
natural just being themselves, and filming in an array of veritable locations;
truck stops, trailer parks, parking lots and abandoned houses along the endless
highways of America, American Honey
looks and feels as authentic as an amateur home video that never censors itself
from the ugliness and beauty of the people and places it visits for short
periods.
This little seen behind the garbage dump corner of American
life could well be the ignored, underrepresented, low income America that
recently put a reality TV business mogul in the White House.
The camera never stops moving as we are ferried endlessly in
a van full of tired restless kids, capturing desolate mind numbing expanses of
American landscapes, strip malls and billboards. But what is most distressing
is the moral emptiness of these kids who will do anything for a buck and are
heading for a dead-end life of drugs and lost dreams.
Sasha’s performance as Star is courageous and vulnerable at
the same time. She wants to find an authentic life and is awestruck by the life
of freedom and fun the traveling group of wild kids seem to lead. Led by the
charismatic slightly older hustler Jake, Shia LaBeouf is exceptional here in a fascinating
performance and brilliantly cast as the longtime team leader and go-between for
the gang of kids and their intimidating female boss Krystal played by Riley
Keough.
Throughout their travels and adventures together Jake and
Star quickly form a strong sensual bond and have a great chemistry between
them. The hip-hop soundtrack of contemporary hits that blasts on the radios of
their vehicles and inside various department stores gets the kids hollering and
dancing with glee as the ever changing landscapes flash by in the background
giving the film a surreal fun-house feel.
Innocence is quickly lost in this dreamlike alternate
reality America as the homeless kids are exposed to the severe realities of
their desperate situations but do so with a life affirming resilience that is
all too recognizable in children shielding themselves from the uncertainty of
their plight.
American Honey is an
intimately observed and brutally honest drama about kids in hopeless situations
living day to day never knowing where they will find themselves and a sad
commentary on the effects of a consumerist and morally corrupt society gripping
America’s youth.
JP
