"American Honey": an Odyssey through the Outskirts of Capitalist America

Take the disillusioning odyssey of Easy Rider and the adolescent adrenaline of Gus Van Sant, then set it against Terrence Malick’s lyrical wastelands, and you’ll have something like the substance of American Honey. It is British director Andrea Arnold’s first feature set in the U.S, yet from the strange intimacy she crafts with her subject, you would never guess it. With a crew of amateur actors, she has created an original coming-of-age tale with an aimless soul of its own. She has proven that a foreigner’s perspective can produce the same organic poetry when it comes to capturing the American ethos.

American Honey is a constellation of grime and splendor, of vicious cycles and improvised joys – a highway to nowhere and everywhere. At the center of the film’s wide and wary sky is Star (Sasha Lane), a dirt-poor teenager from Texas. We first see her digging through a dumpster, trying to feed two kids of a family that isn’t hers. The camera closes in on her shoes crunching over the garbage, the lens gluing itself to the junkyard of capitalist America. This is where Star was born and struggles to survive. As her name suggests, she’s a dreamer at heart, bursting to escape her ugly confines.

Walking into the supermarket, she spots a group of teenagers dancing at the checkout counter to Rihanna’s "We Found Love". Hypnotized by the sight of happy people her own age, Star locks eyes with Jake (Shia LaBoeuf), the wolf of this wild pack of partyers. He is magnetism and manipulation rolled into one. When he flirts with Star in the parking lot, he convinces her to join their “magazine-selling” crew, a mutinous money-scouring enterprise with an arsenal of seedy selling techniques that involve using fake sob stories and inspirational pitches, sexual offers, and even threats to induce potential buyers. As Star quickly finds out, it operates with a ruthlessness that rewards the top-seller at any cost. This, it comes as no surprise, is Jake, who epitomizes the world that Star will come to know: free and electrifying on the surface, calculated underneath.

In many ways, Star is a complete contrast with Jake. She’s unwaveringly honest, averse to using people for her own gain. At times, she even seems recklessly naive. When she gets into the convertible with the Texas cowboys, and later into the truck with the oil field worker, we expect them, all too horribly, to take advantage of her. And yet there is something so genuinely unaffected about Star that brings out the protective side in men. She proves that, in her own way, she can handle herself as well as Jake.

Arnold avoids the cautionary tone and dramatics of a rescue scenario or of a helpless heroine caught in a cruel world, aiming for a true-to-adolescence confusion that crisscrosses between disillusionment and exuberance. Star soon discovers the ugly mechanisms behind this rebellious road-trip/business venture, which operates as a condensed version of capitalist cruelty. The camera even hovers over her and her fellow vagabonds like a kind of trap with its boxlike 4:3 aspect ratio that truncates the wide landscapes and establishes an ironic counterpoint to their carefree road trip. The places they go to sell their magazines are the heart and blood of American fortune: oil fields, truck stops, and wealthy suburbs. The mirage of self-sufficiency dissipates as Star learns that sellers keep only 20% of their earnings; the rest goes toward gas, motels and drugs. At the end of each grueling day, they hand over their money to Jake’s “girlfriend”, Krystal, who has merely chosen him to do her bidding as her top seller/plaything.

The two who earn the least by the end of each week are regularly pitted against each other in a capitalist cage match. We watch as one guy covers himself in red paint and starts to howl, preparing to pummel his opponent, while the crew scarily eggs him on. The teens’ roller-coaster fortress of fun carries the darker impulses of something desperate. Their trip, Krystal reminds Star, is fueled by one thing alone: cash. The possibility of running out is the leviathan under the landscape. Star is warned that if she doesn’t hustle, she might be ditched on the side of the road. Krystal insinuates it wouldn’t be the first time her and Jake had done this to one of their sellers.

It is Star’s sympathy that reignites our faith in a world where survival seems to necessitate cruelty. In one scene, the van enters a neighborhood like the one where Star grew up and Krystal tells them, “Make sure to play on these people’s sympathy. They’re just like you.” But when Star walks into one of the houses in this shantytown, she is too sickened at the thought of conning a family with nothing to eat; instead, she leaves the house without selling anything, goes to the supermarket, and comes back to fill their fridge. Throughout the film, we also see her saving trapped insects, a gesture charged with an odd yet powerful act of identification: Star knows how it feels to be hopelessly stuck and destined to the world's indifference.