Films about people on the margins of American society often risk substituting unfiltered miserabilism for more substantive storytelling. Sometimes this is done to explicitly connect the suffering of poverty with virtue (The Grapes of Wrath, The Pursuit of Happyness), while in other instances the depiction of unmitigated woe and desperation becomes an end in itself (The Dancer in the Dark, Precious).
Among the numerous merits of director Andrea Arnold’s superb new feature American Honey is that it discovers the stunning poetry within the grit and grime of her characters’ hand-to-mouth existence. It is the rare work of American realism that never flinches from the ugliness of its milieu, and yet infuses it with a distinctive, infectious vitality.
At the heart of the film is Star (Sasha Lane), a dreadlocked 18-year-old who is first glimpsed dumpster-diving for food with her older boyfriend’s children. She presently has a chance encounter with a band of itinerant magazine peddlers—all of them young, white, tattooed, and rowdy—led by the swaggering Jake (Shia LaBeouf). With his rat-tail braid and suspenders, Jake looks more like an ex-con applying for a fast-food job than anyone’s conception of Prince Charming. But to Star, he and his gaggle of outsiders represent an egress from a life that has become fearful and wretched. She sets a rendezvous with the group at dawn and is offered a job on the spot by the mastermind of the door-to-door operation, Krystal (Riley Keough), whose trailer park sexpot bearing masks a frosty ruthlessness. Star accepts and never looks back.
American Honey depicts the myriad escapades and tribulations that Star experiences while crisscrossing the nation with Krystal’s band of glorified grifters. While there is a definite narrative arc to Star’s odyssey, it is a loose, episodic tale, befitting the prosaic nature and short horizon time of the characters’ goals. They hawk their questionable wares to pay for shabby motel rooms and the convenience-store snacks and liquor on which they subsist. They party and fight late into the night, never lingering more than few days in any one location.
Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank) is a British filmmaker, but she evinces an astonishing sensitivity to the contradictory character of American life, and of poor American youth in particular. American Honey’s wild bunch are the kind of unruly, obnoxious reprobates that prompt “respectable” people to cross the street. The film’s characters consistently make reckless decisions and then lash out with petulant violence and feverish self-destruction when presented with setbacks. They should be insufferable, and yet Arnold miraculously renders it a glorious experience to spend 163 minutes with them, to share both their joys and humiliations. In the process, the viewer catches glimpses of their fortitude, optimism, and even their well-concealed dreams.
Central to the film’s success is newcomer Lane, whose frank, captivating performance contains not one jot of affectation. In Star, she and Arnold create an authentic and pointed witness to the fidgety hedonism of white’s America’s lowest rungs. As the “new girl” and the lone minority in this capitalist tribe, she is the outsider who is cagily but assertively seeking her place. Just as essential to the film’s success are its magnificent visuals, captured by cinematographer Robbie Ryan with a seemingly inexhaustible astuteness. Traditionally lovely vistas are rare in Honey; the filmmakers instead uncover the unlikely beauty in a notebook covered in glitter stickers, the orange billows of a natural gas flare, or even a green gummy bear stuck to a window. Such expressive details are emblematic of American Honey, a portrait of the American experience that is at once unapologetically grubby and curiously breathtaking.
American Honey opens Friday, October 14 at the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar).
