'American Honey' Satisfyingly Bittersweet

People who don’t like “American Honey” might accuse it of being cheesy, clichéd, and fragmented, akin to a 140-minute-long music video or Instagram post. But people who do like this movie—and there are many—would merely shrug and say: Isn’t everyone’s adolescence a bit cheesy and clichéd? Indeed, the film succeeds primarily due to the honesty, intimacy, and spontaneity with which it portrays its protagonists. Instead of telling a story, it tells of life itself.

When 18-year-old Star (Sasha Lane) has had enough of her boring, poverty-ridden life, she joins a traveling magazine sales crew that spends more time partying than working. While this narrative makes up the plot of the first 30 minutes of the film, after that half hour “American Honey” resembles nothing so much as it does a delicately shot travel log. The film consists of moments and feelings rather than a storyline: Boys fighting half-naked on top of a caravan; girls playing with a pet hamster; the whole crew singing and dancing to Rihanna before falling into a deep sleep. In the flickering light of a bonfire, there are faces, bodies, sweat, tears, and a goodnight kiss.

This kiss is shared between Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Star herself. The first person Star gets to know in the group, Jake also coaches her on how to sell magazines—by making up beautiful lies about raising money from charity, of course. Mature, caring, and experienced, he soon attracts her affection as she blossoms from a little girl to a woman and begins to think of him as her only support. Both LaBeouf and Lane deliver beautiful, unforgettable performances. It is hard to find in LaBeouf any trace of a star: He seems to have grown up living Jake’s lower-class life, so much so that when he teaches Star his street-smart tricks to talk people into buying magazines, it appears as though LaBeouf himself would be able to survive on the basis of these skills should he ever quit his acting career. Lane, despite lacking professional acting experience prior to this film, offers a natural and relatable interpretation of the complexities of a teenage girl’s mind. Her shyness in front of LaBeouf’s character is particularly endearing, and despite the challenges inherent to the task of an actress playing the lead in her debut film—not to mention one in which almost two-thirds of the shots focus on her—Lane effortlessly achieves perfection.

From the elliptical story and the use of handheld camera throughout the film, it is very tempting to speculate that director Andrea Arnold shot “American Honey” with neither script nor storyboard, instead embarking on a road trip with the whole crew, capturing spontaneous reactions along the way. How otherwise could a screenwriter craft such organic dialogues and interactions? How could an actor deliver such a genuine and convincing performance? How could a director picture all those location-specific shots in pre-production? And how could a cinematographer capture the spirit of American Midwest, presupposing nothing, without setting herself out in the landscape and filming what she sees? The sense of freedom and spontaneity “American Honey” possesses is both its biggest merit and an aesthetic practice increasingly rare on the big screen.

The flip side of this spontaneity is an apparent casualness of cinematography and a lack of consistent character development. Some critics may point out that any shot in the film looks as though it could have been taken by a 17-year-old Instagram user, but that quality does not actually detract from the film. The protagonists of “American Honey” are exactly the kinds of people who would keep a record of their travels on social media; filming from their perspective imbues the film with an invaluable realism. Similarly, the flatness of character development is also more of a merit than a weakness, as it more closely resembles life. In reality, not all experiences, not even the life-changing ones, have immediate and specific impacts on one’s personality. At the end of the film, Star seems to have matured significantly—and yet in some respects she has changed very little from the beginning, making for a much more realistic depiction.

“American Honey” is a web that captures the feelings of adolescence as they drift in the wind. These sentiments are happy and melancholic; sometimes clichéd but always genuine. This beautiful work consolidates Arnold’s position as a quintessential film auteur of our age and witnesses some of the industry’s most remarkable performances in recent years.

—Staff writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxing.lan@thecrimson.com.