American Honey [Blu-ray]

Director: Andrea Arnold Andrea Arnold

Overview

In order to escape her dead-end life in Oklahoma, an 18-year-old named Star (Sasha Lane) joins a crew of young salespeople who are hawking magazine subscriptions across the Midwest. Along the way, she falls for a charismatic co-worker (Shia LaBeouf). Riley Keough co-stars. Written and directed by Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank).

Product Details

Release Date:	12/27/2016
UPC:	0031398254492
Original Release:	2016
Rating:	R
Source:	LIONSGATE - 600000-AEC LGE
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Language:	English
Time:	2:42:00
Sales rank:	25,046

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Sasha Lane	Star
Shia LaBeouf	Jake
Riley Keough	Krystal
McCaul Lombardi	Corey
Arielle Holmes	Pagan
Crystal Ice	Katness
Shawna Rae Moseley	Shaunte
Verronikah Ezell	QT
Chad McKenzie Cox	Billy
Garry Howell	Austin
Kenneth Kory Tucker	Sean
Raymond Coalson	JJ
Isaiah Stone	Kalium
Dakota Powers	Runt
Christopher David Wright	Actor
Will Patton	Backseat Cowboy
Chad Cox	Actor
Michael Hunsaker	Logan
Laura Kirk	Laura
Sam Williamson	Driving Cowboy
Chris Bylsma	Neighborhood Man
Andrea Fantauzzi	Jogger

Technical Credits

Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold	Director,Screenwriter
Marisa Clifford	Executive Producer,Producer
Rose Garnett	Executive Producer,Producer
Melissa Hook	Executive Producer,Producer
Hardy Justice	Executive Producer,Producer
David Kosse	Executive Producer,Producer
Celine Rattray	Executive Producer,Producer
Trudie Styler	Executive Producer,Producer
Charlotte Ubben	Executive Producer
Thomas Benski	Producer
Lars Knudsen	Producer
Lucas Ochoa	Producer
Pouya Shahbazian	Producer
Jay van Hoy	Producer
Alice Weinberg	Producer
Lucy Pardee	Casting
Jennifer Venditti	Casting
Mike Goodridge	Executive Producer,Producer
Paul Grindey	Executive Producer,Producer
Nicolas Becker	Sound Effects
Aymeric Devoldère	Sound Effects
Karolina Dziwinska	Sound Effects
Kevin Hamilton	Special Effects

Editorial Reviews

Acclaimed British director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, the Oscar-winning short Wasp) turns her attention to the U.S. heartland with her freewheeling coming-of-age picaresque American Honey. Clocking in at just under three hours, Arnold's sprawling, hypnotic tale follows a crew of young adults as they sell magazines door-to-door across the country. We first meet 18-year-old Star (newcomer Sasha Lane) knee-deep in a dumpster with two young children as they're all rummaging for food. While trying to hitch a ride home after collecting some discarded grub, a van of rowdy teenagers drives past and stops off at the strip mall behind them. Star makes eyes at Jake (Shia LaBeouf), the charismatic, crust-punk leader of the group, who explains their magazine-hawking lifestyle and extends an invite for her to join. In order to do so, Star escapes the home of her deadbeat boyfriend and returns the two children to their birth mother, then reconnects with Jake and the rest of the kids at a motel. Jake serves as the right-hand man to Krystal (Riley Keough), the group's steely-eyed business coordinator. She offers Star a spot in the van, but with the caveat that she must sell subscriptions or face a quick boot to the side of the road. Star bonds quickly with the eclectic teens -- who come from different parts of the country, but have similar broken-home backstories -- over car singalongs, drinks, and smokes. Jake takes Star under his wing for the first few weeks of selling to show her the ropes, and their chemistry and sexual tension grows. However, Jake is also intimately involved with Krystal, and wishes to keep this new romance a secret. The kids trek onwards through cities and small towns, in pursuit of willing customers under Krystal's orders. Arnold could have dialed back the ambitions of American Honey into a more compact narrative, but the meandering audacity of her scope is something to behold. The film is naturalist almost to a fault, as there are scenes that serve little purpose except to flesh out the details of the kids' journey. But if viewers are inclined to submit to this whirling dervish of a picture, its shortcomings fall to the wayside. American Honey is alive with the splendor of youth and the wandering sense of freedom that so many other road movies have tried and failed to harness. Lane delivers an enthralling acting debut with her performance as the volatile, oscillating Star. The camera never strays too far from her pensive gaze -- it will occasionally explore the crew's ever-changing surroundings, but always returns to the radiant lead actress. LaBeouf is perfectly cast as the alluring drifter Jake, and the shared screen time between the two leads is alternately explosive and tender. Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan beautifully capture the repetition of what an American road trip actually looks like. It's a gritty gorgeousness that pairs natural wonders with bonfires, long-stretching highways with dilapidated oil towns. And the photography ebbs and flows to a hip-hop soundtrack that every character knows by heart. Kids like these are rarely the subject of movies this understanding. Almost all of the teens are runaways, tattooed and pierced vagrants living on the fringes of society. Yet Arnold is careful not to turn their lifestyle of self-indulgence, or the destitute conditions they come across while traversing the country, into a voyeuristic sideshow. Extreme poverty is, by its very nature, either difficult to look at or hard to believe, but Arnold is merely taking inventory of an America that was never significant enough even to be forgotten in the public eye. American Honey may feel like an exhaustive search for an epiphany to some. Its reoccurring motifs of dreams and settling down into adulthood are half-baked, and pointedly so. This is a coming-of-age drama, but the revelations that the characters reach aren't ones of rosy self-realization or true love. They're truths about how many lives fall between the cracks in our society, and the way that beautiful optimism can flourish in those cracks.