Andrea Arnold's "American Honey" was a Sundance Film Festival darling this past year, which very often translates in film parlance to "overrated."
And that is the case as well for "Honey," an overlong film that says enough to fill a 90-minute film but drones on for almost twice that long, incessantly repeating the plight of disaffected millennials with nowhere to go and nothing worthwhile to do. Dragging us on that journey for weeks or months onscreen feels almost that long experiencing it as a film.
Star (Sasha Lane, in an outstanding performance) is a young girl who, we surmise, has not been treated well by the adults in her life, trying in vain to keep her father's hands off her while taking care of her younger siblings. She meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who flirts with her, enchanting her enough to finally tell off her line-dancing mother. Her reaction upon being asked to take care of her own children tells us Star's role models aren't all that strong.
She then sets out on the road, joining a group of other kids her age to sell magazine subscriptions, a task that's as big a waste of time as the products they're hawking considering that, as the kids themselves mention, "no one reads magazines anymore." But they still give it their all, inventing stories as to why they are selling the magazines and scamming people into buying them, bringing in a comparatively meager amount of money than they could be making selling a variety of other products.
Jake is the right-hand man of Krystal (Riley Keough), who is as blasé about answering her motel room door in the nude as she is in telling Star that she is just about always on the verge of being fired. We sense something is going on between Krystal and Jake, but they both play coy. And so it goes, as the gang goes from neighborhood to neighborhood, from motel to motel, showing us that being a teenager is still VERY HARD.
LaBeouf puts his all into Jake, playing him as an unwashed sleaze whose motives are never clear. Does he really fancy Star or is he conning her like he does the suburban housewives he lies to daily? And what does Star want from all of this, outside of a way out of her intolerable existence?
All of this is not to say "American Honey" is a bad movie. It is frequently engaging and has some of the best cinematography of the year. But at 163 minutes, there is almost enough material for two full movies, and it is frequently tiresome seeing the wash, rinse, repeat. Arnold shows a flair for creating dramatic tension but needed to chop this film down significantly.