American Honey

2016 drama

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A teenager falls under Shooby Leboof's spell and joins a caravan of driftless door-to-door magazine salespeople.

The idea of this movie is a lot better than its execution. Shooby Leboof electrifies things. Early on, he seems to be having trouble keeping his finger out of his eye, but he gives his character a rhythm that I liked, and the unpredictability of the character kept things interesting. And he has a fanny pack. And if you're in to this sort of thing and enjoyed his sex scenes in Nymphomaniac, you get to see him have some movie sex in this one.

Of course, at a little under three hours, there's a good chance that you'll end up getting to see these characters do nearly everything. That's probably the main problem with American Honey--its length. I'm not sure there's enough here to justify that running time. There's not a lot of character development, and any conflicts really only simmer rather than bubble to life. The film's episodic, but there's not a lot of variety between the episodes and they have this same cadence that makes things feel redundant pretty quickly. Things picked up a bit when the main character befriends some old cowboys, but that scene is disrupted by something that doesn't make all that much sense. And then it goes back to that same tired rhythm the movie had before the cowboys showed up. There's just not a lot of substance to the whole thing, and the character arc for Star--the protagonist--doesn't feel authentic. There's such a clash between the cinema verite style and the more plastic emotional bits. . You just don't buy those aforementioned sex scenes, Star's interaction with some children, clashes with her boss, or an encounter with a turtle.

At an hour and a half, this movie might have been something that I liked a lot more. And maybe a lot of scenes where Sasha Lane just isn't very good could have been cut. There are times when I really liked her performance, but it was uneven to the point where the character didn't even make much sense. Only in the most maudlin bits of this--the plastic parts--did I really feel like I knew what was going on in Star's mind. It's an intriguing first performance though.