Sasha Lane makes a compelling debut in Andrea Arnold’s extraordinary American Honey
AMERICAN HONEY (Andrea Arnold, 2016)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, March 15, 5:30
Festival runs March 1-24
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.americanhoney-movie.com
Metrograph continues its “Forever Young” series with Andrea Arnold’s fourth feature film, an exhilarating and daring whirlwind epic about marginalized college-age youth trying to make a go of it in contemporary America. In American Honey, her third Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes (following Fish Tank and Red Road), Arnold goes on the road with the 071 mag crew, a group of itinerant high school dropouts and runaways who cross middle America in a van, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. As in all of her films, Arnold casts many nonprofessional actors, including Sasha Lane, who she discovered on a Florida beach during spring break. Lane makes a dazzling debut as Star, a young woman in an extremely dysfunctional family who is captivated by Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and his friends’ antics in a Walmart. Lured in by Jake’s seductive charm, she runs away from home and joins the ragtag bunch of more than a dozen lost souls who have formed a kind of unique family of their own. Led by the tough Krystal (Riley Keough) and the bold Jake, the mag crew spends its days trying to sell subscriptions for cash, making their way through various communities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota. At night they stay at motels and party all night long, drinking, dancing, singing, and goofing around.
The tight-knit group consists of Shaunte (Shawna Rae Moseley, the real-life owner of the mag crew’s pit bull), Pagan (Arielle Holmes, who detailed her own troubles in Heaven Knows What), Katness (former exotic dancer Crystal B. Ice), QT (Verronikah Ezell, who is raising a daughter with her wife), Billy (singer-songwriter Chad McKenzie Cox), Austin (former high school football player Garry Howell), Sean (construction worker Kenneth Kory Tucker, who is dating Moseley), JJ (Raymond Coalson), Kalium (skateboarder Isaiah Stone), Runt (Dakota Powers), Corey (McCaul Lombardi), and Chris (Christopher David Wright), most of whom revel in their freedom, unworried about parents, the government, or other authority figures. Meanwhile, Krystal is a kind of modern-day Fagin, threatening to kick out poor performers, forcing those with the lowest sales figures into brutal fistfights with each other. The street-smart but sensitive Star does what she needs to survive, including getting into cars and trucks with men who have something more than magazines on their mind, although she is disturbed by Jake’s lies and how he and others steal from customers. The film is a breathtaking coming-of-age tale not just for Star but for this entire generation of kids who have been shut out of mainstream society, for whatever reason, but are not giving up on their dreams.
Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Star (Sasha Lane) encounter some major trouble in exhilarating road-trip movie
Inspired by a 2007 New York Times article by Ian Urbina that detailed the very real and harsh story of mag crews, Arnold traveled across parts of America by herself in researching the film, then had members of the cast actually try to sell magazine subscriptions in Kansas City. The film was shot in fifty-six days as the cast and a limited crew traveled in vans and stayed in motels. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who has photographed all four of Arnold’s feature films (as well as Philomena and several documentaries), does a superb job of capturing the open road, the Bible Belt neighborhoods, and the wild abandon and exciting energy exhibited by the mag crew, who were allowed to develop their characters and improvise. The soundtrack is critical to the film, and it boasts a wide variety of music, with songs by E-40, the Raveonettes, Ciara featuring Ludacris, Bruce Springsteen, Jeremih, Mazzy Star, Carnage, Razzy Bailey, Kevin Gates, Quigley, MadeinTYO, Lady Antebellum, and others. The actors, most of whom are making their first cinematic appearances, form a tight-knit family that is thrilling to watch develop. LaBeouf (Transformers, Nymphomaniac) gives one of his best performances as the hard-to-figure-out Jake, while Lane, who moved to Los Angeles to continue acting, is mesmerizing as Star, whose problems are emblematic of so much of what is wrong in today’s society. The film is very much about the hopes and dreams of this lost generation — and how the American dream has failed them. A 162-minute film about disaffected youth selling magazine subscriptions in the twenty-first century might not sound like a slam dunk, but Arnold, in her first film made in the States, has created an unforgettable vision of the country today. “We explore, like, America; we party. Come with us,” Jake tells Sasha early on. We’re glad we went along for the ride too; so will you.
American Honey opened on September 30, 2016, at the Landmark Sunshine and Loews Lincoln Square, the same day that the New York Film Festival began. Curiously, Arnold was the inaugural 2013 filmmaker in residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the host of the festival, but American Honey was not selected for the fifty-fourth annual event. Among the upcoming “Forever Young” screenings are Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and John Waters’s Cry-Baby.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Andrea Arnold’s fourth feature film is an exhilarating and daring whirlwind epic about marginalized college-age youth trying to make a go of it in contemporary America. In American Honey, her third Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes (following 
Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What is a harrowing tale about addiction and obsession, but it turns out that its back story is much more compelling than what shows up onscreen. Josh was researching a film about the Diamond District when he came upon Arielle Holmes, a nineteen-year-old temp assistant. He was determined to find out more about her and shortly discovered that she was a homeless junkie with a wild, unpredictable druggie boyfriend, Ilya. Josh and Benny, who had previous collaborated on such indie features as The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Daddy Longlegs and the documentary Lenny Cooke, commissioned Holmes to write her story, and she quickly delivered 150 pages that ultimately inspired the film, in which Holmes plays Harley, a young heroin addict living on the streets of New York City, spanging money (begging for spare change) for her next fix while in a combative relationship with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). Harley has done something to alienate Ilya, and she says she will kill herself to prove her love and devotion. He tells her to go ahead and do it, so she slits one of her wrists and is rushed to the hospital. That sets the stage for the rest of the lurid and sordid narrative, as Haley bounces between the cruel Ilya and her drug dealer, the far more easygoing and mellow Mike (real-life street legend Buddy Duress in his acting debut); she is also followed around by Skully (rapper Necro), who wants to save her from herself but is clearly in no position to do so.