American Honey

At nearly three hours of nonstop braggadocio, bleakness, bravura camera moves and angry hip-hop, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey was always destined to be a great cinematic polarizer. Personally, I was drunk on this crazy thing from the opening frames, mesmerized by its attitude of endless possibility amid utter despair, addicted to the almost filterless sense of cinema. American Honey is dizzying and alive, like a documentary about a dream, a color-saturated road trip to nowhere imbued with a shocking sort of hope. Sasha Lane dominates the screen as Star (although Shia LeBeouf and Riley Keough are excellent in supporting roles), a poor teenager who escapes an abusive relationship to join a vagabond group selling magazine subscriptions across America’s asshole. There is a constant tension between the hypnotic pulse of the party and the desperate imperatives of poverty, such as the scene where country line dancers grudgingly shuffle through their steps like political prisoners. D.B.