Amer­i­can Hon­ey – first look review

Andrea Arnold is an excit­ing direc­tor who knows how to cre­ate a thick pati­na of real­ism with­in which female pro­tag­o­nists sto­ical­ly pur­sue improve­ment. It’s a lit­tle crush­ing, there­fore, that Amer­i­can Hon­ey feels unmoored from any­thing approach­ing real life.

New­com­er Sasha Lane plays Star, an 18-year-old Tex­an (“a real Amer­i­can hon­ey”) who for­ages in tips to feed her young sib­lings. When Jake (Shia LaBeouf), with his long plait, flir­ty spir­it and wild entourage starts mak­ing eyes at her, she dumps the kids on a sis­ter, join­ing him on the open road with a rag-tag gang of music-pump­ing, fire­work-explod­ing, mag­a­zine-sell­ing youths.

Jake is a nuts char­ac­ter, to a point both hys­ter­i­cal­ly fun­ny and deeply weari­some. In his intro­duc­to­ry scene, set in a super­mar­ket, he jumps onto the till’s con­vey­er belt to dance to Rihanna’s ​‘We Found Love’. He spends the rest of the film being pre­dictably unpre­dictable, zoom­ing off on a motor­bike, howl­ing like a wolf, telling tall tales to would-be mag­a­zine buy­ers and, of course, cavort­ing with Star.

Amer­i­can Hon­ey is a mood movie defined by music (every­thing from Ludacris to Mazzy Star) elec­tri­fy­ing a van full of whoop­ing kids who are speed­ing their way from town to town, sell­ing mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tions to finance booze, food and nights in motels. There are two stars in Amer­i­can Hon­ey: the labelled one and Arnold’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­bie Ryan. His rov­ing cam­era match­es the bom­bas­tic tunes with mem­o­rably high-octane pho­tog­ra­phy. Whether film­ing the shapes and colours of the coun­try, the city or the lead char­ac­ters, he finds heady poet­ic detail that almost com­pen­sates for the grow­ing sense that this film is rid­dled with falseness.

While it’s excit­ing and roman­tic on the sur­face, beyond the euphor­ic and self-sus­tain­ing eco-sys­tem in the van, there is noth­ing of sub­stance. The Amer­i­cans encoun­tered are two-dimen­sion­al meat pup­pets. It’s implau­si­ble that strangers are uni­form­ly cool with this rov­ing gang of row­dy kids and their boom­ing nois­es. There are no con­fronta­tions from oth­er peo­ple stay­ing at motels, even when fire­works are let off in the park­ing lot. The cau­tious atti­tude that rebel­lious behav­iour inevitably brings out of con­ven­tion­al peo­ple is flat­tened down to enable Arnold to have her hon­ey and eat it.

This same lack of def­i­n­i­tion is present across the ensem­ble cast. Apart from Star, Jake and hard-ass busi­ness direc­tor Krys­tal (played by Elvis’ grand­daugh­ter, Riley Keough), all char­ac­ters are inter­change­able. One likes to get his dick out. Anoth­er seems sad, but these are minus­cule sig­ni­fiers. Group mem­bers are as indi­vid­ual as faces bob­bing in a fes­ti­val audi­ence. They par­ty togeth­er, sleep togeth­er and tum­ble over each oth­er like lobot­o­mised kit­tens. They are giv­en faux edgy dia­logue that feels like lines, rather than real talk.

Sacha Lane has a watch­ful charis­ma and twitchy ener­gy that is enjoy­able to watch for stretch­es. These are always inter­rupt­ed by some non­sense occur­ring. Char­ac­ter and anec­dote are sac­ri­fi­cial lambs before Amer­i­can Honey’s cen­tral fix­a­tion of crank­ing up the dra­ma of the every­day, for­get­ting to give its ver­sion of the every­day any ring of truth. It runs before it can walk. There is no famil­iar­i­ty or grav­i­tas. Amer­i­can Hon­ey is too rest­less and impa­tient to estab­lish any­thing and instead rides high on an obvi­ous­ly fab­ri­cat­ed atmosphere.