Love, Life, and the Pursuit of Happiness in AMERICAN HONEY

Rating: 🍯🍯🍯🍯

Trailer

You’re on a road trip passing through Oklahoma. In need of supplies that gas stations don’t carry, you stop at a crappy K-Mart in the middle of some podunk town. As you enter the store you see a rough-looking group of young people singing at the top of their lungs to a Rihanna song, dancing like they’re in a club, jumping on register countertops and throwing food into the air — American Honey is about these people.

Our heroine, Star (played by the talented Sasha Lane), spends her days taking care of her siblings who her deadbeat parents try to forget are there. Drifting, rather than living life for herself, she stumbles across a vagabond group of misfits and runaways who travel around in a van selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door in order to pay for their motel stays, pizza, and any type of buzz they can reach. When the alluring leader of the group, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), takes interest in Star and tells her to join them, Star seizes the opportunity, creating a new life traveling the southern United States and trying to find what she really wants out of life.

Director Andrea Arnold creates a vivacious portrait of love, life, and the pursuit of happiness in American Honey. The film is as real as it gets. Beyond the stunning cinematography with nectar hues and flashes of accurate Americana in each shot is Arnold’s construction of genuine fleshed out characters. Star and the gang aren’t just cartoonish caricatures of characters, but rather people you see, talk to, walk past, argue with, connect with, and maybe judge every single day.

Arnold digs past the surface level motive for each of these characters who on paper should just be doing their best to pay rent, and instead depicts each of their longings for something more than survival. American Honey takes a deep look at the "American Dream" and questions whether or not we're already living it — or if it's really even worth searching out in the first place.