American Honey is a 2016 road drama film written and directed by Andrea Arnold, and starring Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, and Riley Keough.
[5][6][7] American Honey received positive reviews, with praise for Arnold’s direction, Lane's performance, and Ryan’s cinematography.
While trying to hitchhike home one day, she spies a van full of young people and makes eye contact with Jake, one of the boys in the group.
Star follows them to a local Kmart and sees Jake dance to "We Found Love" on top of the registers before being forced out of the store.
Star returns Jake's phone, as it had fallen out of his pocket, and he offers her a job as part of their magazine sales crew, telling her to come with him to Kansas City.
Packing her belongings while Nathan is in another room, Star secretly escapes and takes the children to the club where their stepmother Misty dances.
Star finds it difficult to sell as Jake lies to a potential customer in order to make money.
The trio bring her to their home and offer to buy several subscriptions if she eats the worm at the bottom of a bottle of mezcal.
When they return to the hotel for the evening, Jake tells her not to mention their relationship, and he gives the money Star earned to Krystal.
For a while, things between Jake and Star are tense, and Krystal threatens to drop her on the side of the road if she keeps causing trouble.
Star asks him what his dreams are, and he shows her his private stash of cash and items he's stolen from the houses he visits, which he intends to use to buy a home.
Star climbs in the back of their truck and tries to sell to them, but one of the oil workers tells her he'll pay her five hundred dollars to go on a date with him.
Krystal calls Star to her room and informs her she has let Jake go, that she paid him money for each girl he recruited, and that he slept with all of them.
Arnold began writing the screenplay in 2013 and it was first announced under the pre-production title Mag Crew at Film4's 2013 Cannes Film Festival party.
[18] Casting directors Lucy Pardee and Jennifer Venditti also scoured public areas such as Walmart, bars, and dollar stores to scout individuals that would fit the roles of the mag crew youths.
[27][42] The film's soundtrack consists of 19 songs and features a mix of genres such as hip hop (specifically trap music), country, and pop rock.
[44] According to music critic Robert Christgau, the film's soundtrack album went "unheralded" but "makes a single living thing of Rae Sremmurd and the Raveonettes, E-40 and Steve Earle as the must-see Andrea Arnold flick it's attached to follows a troupe of young magazine-subscription hustlers across flyover country more humane than its taste in presidents might lead cineastes to believe."
The website's critical consensus reads, "American Honey offers a refreshingly unconventional take on the coming-of-age drama whose narrative risks add up to a rewarding experience even if they don't all pay off.
Yet it's constantly, engrossingly active, spinning and sparking and exploding in cycles like a Fourth of July Catherine wheel.
"[68] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "A road movie without a map that nonetheless arrives at a worthwhile destination," and wrote, "The film works best as a poignant character study, observing Star as she settles into her independence and figures out who she wants to be, framed by a vast physical landscape that stretches socioeconomically from privileged wealth to squalid poverty.