I live in the outskirts of Sebastopol, so the so-called “mag crews” don’t appear at my front door. But when we lived in Hermosa Beach, they were a several-times-a-week fixture. Those hucksters were always young, always vulnerable, and always poised for the “kill” of getting you to sign up for unneeded magazines. Writer/director Andrea Arnold has fleshed out a New York Times article by Ian Urbana into American Honey, the 162-minute-long, sex, drugs and hip-hop filled, cross-country odyssey taken by Star (Sasha Lane), a luckless teen desperate to escape her groping father and the 24-hours-a-day responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. Star finds her means of escape in a Walmart by flirting with Jake (Shia LeBoeuf) the scruffy-looking oldest member of a group of teens who are escorted out by store security. “If you want a job,” Jake tells Star, “be at the Motel 6 tomorrow morning.”
Star boards a 15-passenger Ford van already crammed with teens. When they arrive at a Kansas City motel, Jake hands her a sheet of rules “to learn by heart,” before meeting the mag-crew boss, Crystal (played by Elvis’ granddaughter, Riley Keough). “We’re here to make money,” Crystal tells her. “And you do that by selling you — not magazines.” Star quickly learns that the secret to making sales is you lie — a lot. College tuition; sick mother; father killed in Iraq; travel expenses to go home — whatever scam works to tug at the conscience and heartstrings of the sucker standing in the doorway.
Arnold films everything from Star’s point-of-view, so we are in the van as the kids sing hip-hop songs; inside motels where the rules dictate the boys stay out of the girls’ rooms; and in neighborhoods where crew members are dropped off every few blocks for the door-to-door hustle. We are also privy to the booze, cigarette, and weed-fueled tribal rituals: the tradition that everyone dance when they hear Rhianna sing “It’s like you’re screaming and no one can hear (but) We found love in a hopeless place;” the bare-knuckle fight between the two with that week’s lowest sales figures; the lakeside fireworks and jumping over the flames of the campfire while getting high, and the complex dom/sub relationship between Crystal and Jake.
Arnold says she plucked most of her crew (including former waitress, Sasha Lane) from beaches, skate parks and street corners. Many of the best-remembered scenes are unscripted, with the unprofessionals’ freshness and vitality adding a zing to the proceedings (along with the realization that every one in the constantly shifting roster of teens is searching for the same thing — a loving, safe place to grow up).
Perhaps because Arnold is British, she can look at the landscapes Star travels through with a different sensibility. Star’s own home life was horrific, so when she enters a posh house on her first day of training, it is with open-mouthed disbelief. Jake has wormed his way inside by asking for a glass of water to “hydrate my sister.” Star inexplicably refuses to play along, shunning the water and using profanities to tell the homeowner, “I’m no way his sister.” As the woman escorts them out of the house she stresses how vulgarities aren’t tolerated in her Christian home. Jake makes the woman look through the window where a half-dozen, underwear-clad, junior-high, slumber party girls are twerking to the obscene lyrics of a hip-hop song. “Turn that off, and stop that dancing,” the mother yells. “No,” her Christian-raised daughter answers. “It’s my birthday, and you said I could do anything I want.”
Note: This is not a film for people who want things short and sweet and tidily wrapped up at the end. It is an artistically filmed, episodic odyssey across the underbelly of America’s heartland, with unflinchingly intense scenes of underage sex, drinking, and smoking backed up with a soundtrack that screams 2016.
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