Waking up from the American dream

By N.B.

IT takes quite some gall for a British writer-director to put the word “American” in a title, implying as it does that they have a deep insight into the state of the nation. Andrea Arnold’s new film justifies that gall. As admired as she was for her three award-winning British dramas—the searing “Red Road” and “Fish Tank”, and her grubby reinvention of “Wuthering Heights”—none of them had the scope or ambition of “American Honey”, a wild, rambling, romantic road movie which rolls along for two-and-three-quarter hours, and which seems, from its title onwards, to be making a grand statement about class and capitalism in today’s America. What that statement is, mind you, is never entirely clear.

The film’s 18-year-old heroine, Star (Texan newcomer Sasha Lane), lives in squalor in a nowhere Oklahoma town with two younger children and one older man, none of whom seem to be a blood relation. Salvation arrives one day in the unlikely form of a white minivan in a Walmart car park. Its occupants are a dozen men and women in their teens and 20s, all of them as poor, uneducated and tattooed as she is. The one who catches her eye is Jake (Shia LaBeouf, in his most sympathetic performance to date), a roguish charmer who sports a pierced eyebrow and a long plaited pony tail, but who also wears suit trousers with braces because he thinks they make him look “Donald Trump-ish”.

His gang of pasty waifs and strays drives around the country drinking and partying and paying for their petrol and their cheap motel rooms by selling magazine subscriptions from door to door. It sounds like a task from one of the early weeks of “The Apprentice”, and, if it were, Jake would be in the winning team. He is so good at spinning hard-luck stories that he can scam anyone into buying a subscription—or at least letting him into their house long enough for him to pocket some of their jewellery. Star is beguiled by him, too. When he invites her to join his rag-tag “mag crew”, she hops into the minivan and they drive off to Kansas City. But Star has yet to meet the crew’s sexpot leader, Krystal (Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter and inheritor of his smouldering charisma). She may be no older than the others, but she is obeyed unquestioningly by all of them, Jake included.

What separates “American Honey” from previous cinematic road trips is the lowliness of the travellers’ aspirations. Whereas their predecessors drove off in search of freedom, rebirth, and the soul of America, these 21st-century youngsters are content to work for peanuts for an exploitative boss. The music they all sing along to in the van doesn’t consist of protest songs or rebel anthems, but hip-hop tracks which fetishize making money. And the landscape they traverse isn’t the great outdoors, but a series of decaying, rubbish-strewn towns, sterile suburbs and hellish oil fields. Their odyssey doesn’t even offer much in the way of danger and excitement. Several sequences look as if they’re going to end badly, because the fearless Star has a nerve-racking habit of jumping into cars with strange men, but they always finish with her returning unscathed to the crew, with nothing much to show for her adventures except a few extra dollars. The open road has never been narrower.

This depressing portrayal of a directionless, culture-less country may make “American Honey” seem like the work of a condescending outsider, but Ms Arnold treats her characters with respect and affection. Most of the cast, including Ms Lane, had never acted before she discovered them, and they are so convincing in their roles that the film has the ragged authenticity of a fly-in-the-wall documentary. It also has moments of heart-swelling joy and beauty, thanks to Robbie Ryan’s transcendent cinematography and the crew’s raucous camaraderie. “American Honey” will frustrate some viewers, because it is so long and so loosely structured, but most will be carried along by the energy and bravado of Star and her new acquaintances. The only question is whether that energy and bravado will take them anywhere apart from the next town and the next motel.