Sasha Lane and Shia LaBeouf star in American Honey.
American Honey will make you feel dirty. Not because it features several scenes of barely clothed young people grinding up against each other (though they are designed to arouse, successfully) but because director Andrea Arnold is so fascinated with the sheer amount of grime, filth and decay that, in her vision at least, constitute the American South. It's there that the British filmmaker chronicles the exploits of Star (Sasha Lane), orphan to a meth-head mother, and her merry band of youthful delinquents (including Shia LaBeouf, at his rattiest) who eke out a living selling – of all things – magazine subscriptions. Don't worry: The ferociously brilliant Arnold (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) doesn't spend much time on the ins and outs of the magazine industry so much as she languidly follows a lost generation as they stumble from one hollowed-out town to the next, trying to hold on to anything they can (love, sex, drugs, more sex) as their lives slowly slip out of focus. It's bold, captivating cinema, with a soundtrack that threatens to never leave your head.
Barry Hertz