In Andrea Arnold’s American Honey we get a meander across America via a white van full of underprivileged, tattooed youth selling magazine subscriptions.* Star’s (Sasha Lane**) good heart shines through, cutting through the layers of poverty, scraping, and fighting to get a handhold up to the place where you can start pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. This long, uncomfortable*** film is worth watching and will stick with me for a very long time.
Verdict: Recommended
Cost: free via Multnomah County Library’s streaming service Kanopy
Where watched: at home
*All of these kids need a lot of interventions, probably starting with access to any amount of unconditional love.
**Who recently caught my eye in the Miseducation of Cameron Post and was also the love interest in Hearts Beat Loud
***Two hours and forty minutes of me feeling every ounce of my middle-class privilege. Plus the conflicting feelings of Shia LaBeouf’s skeevieness vs. me kind of rooting for him.
A thing my middle-class self and this lot have in common: love of music. This was my favorite scene of the movie. Stuff that advances the plot is happening while the song is playing, and the van sing-along that develops parallels many of my adolescent times with friends in a car.