This travelogue from British auteur Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank”) felt at times like my own road trips through the US: The landscape is sometimes very beautiful and sometimes very stark, and I’d really like to stop for a pee break. At 162 minutes, “American Honey” may test some viewers’ patience, but for this one, it paid off with an unflinching portrait of middle America, a love letter to the open road and a dynamic newcomer in Sasha Lane.
Lane is magnetic from the moment we meet her teen character, Star, foraging in an Oklahoma dumpster. Sporting dreadlocks, abundant ink and a faraway look, she’s itching to escape the misery of a poverty-stricken existence with a predatory dad. When a van full of boisterous kids rolls through town, headed by a rat-tailed Shia LaBeouf, they beckon, and she’s in.
Arnold spent months researching real-life “mag crews” in their late teens and early 20s who traverse the country selling magazine subscriptions. If that sounds like a dubious way to make a living, it is: Southern ice queen Krystal (Riley Keough) runs the crew (many of them non-actors) with a spray-tanned iron fist, bunking them in seedy motels and occasionally demanding the lowest earners fight each other. But because they all come from backgrounds like Star’s, they still find a fierce joy in the bohemian gig.
When the van rolls into Kansas City, its occupants are genuinely awed by the skyline: “This is where Superman lives!” one crows. Newbie Star is paired with LaBeouf’s Jake, the team’s charismatic but unstable champion seller, to learn the ropes, and sparks fly. Say what you will about real-life LaBeouf (edgy performance artist or pretentious narcissist?), but he can still bring the acting chops.
“American Honey” might have benefited from some trimming, but I admire Arnold’s resistance: Each vignette here is a key part of a young woman’s life-changing journey. To insist on telling it all feels like a feminist act, butt-numbing length be damned.