With American Honey, Andrea Arnold, a Briton, has made the richest, sublimest US movie of the year: a docu-fairytale that’s also a musical of sorts, an odyssey-like road trip through the other America, with a working-class teenager’s bildungsroman at its ever-beating heart.
Plot-wise, there’s not much to tell: 18-year-old Star (newcomer Sasha Lane), stuck in Oklahoman poverty, looking after her siblings and harassed by her abusive step-dad, sees a charismatic bunch of kids turn into a Rihanna-led song-and-dance flashmob at Walmart and falls for their rat-tailed leader Jake (Shia Le Boeuf). He drops a talisman: a golden iPhone! She picks it up and follows him, donning red slippers and leaving home for ever. The Wizard Of Oz, the Pied Piper and The Red Shoes all conjured in a flurry of images; will Star, like Dorothy, step into her own tornado to discover a new realm of colour and beauty? Or, like the girl in The Red Shoes, will she simply dance herself to death?
Don’t sweat the answer, just hang on for the ride and enjoy the scenery. The troupe of kids are magazine-subscription sellers, criss-crossing the country in a minivan under the piratical leadership of crew-boss Krystal (Riley Keough, ruling every scene she’s in), who speeds ahead in her Mustang seeking new markets and new marks. The kids hype themselves up for this by singing along to rap and country anthems (all chosen by the amateur cast) as the miles roll under them. They love, encourage and guard one another in ways that suggest a lost tribe, a children’s crusade, a pirate ship or a 21st-century remake of Wild Boys Of The Road.
American Honey never becomes any of the many movies it calls to mind, for instance, Another Day In Paradise or Spring Breakers (though it has certainly internalised certain lessons of the latter masterpiece). On a solid British chassis of Loach-y social realism and neorealist strategies, Arnold has built a wild, gritty and tough, yet utterly joyous and optimistic, incantatory siren song of a movie, visually intoxicating and musically transformative.
Andrea Arnold, above all, has shed her British reserve in a way few British film-makers have ever done while making their first US movie (the distasteful idea of “becoming American” always stymies them). This one really earns its titular “American”: it’s an Arnold movie to its back teeth, but it truly accesses the vibrant swagger and energy of such ur-American film-makers as Wild Bill Wellman and Raoul Walsh. American Honey, like their work, and like no other movie this year, is almost ridiculously full of life.
American Honey is out on Friday 14 October
