American Honey (2016)

Directed by Andrea Arnold. Starring Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough, McCaul Lombardi, Isaiah Stone, Arielle Holmes, Shawna Rae Moseley, Crystal B. Ice, Will Patton, Sam Williamson, Daran Shinn, Bruce Gregory, Laura Kirk. [R]

Troubled teen Lane accepts an invitation from LaBeouf to join his traveling door-to-door magazine sales crew, comprised primarily of other misfits. Writer/director Arnold captures intermittent vitality through unchaperoned whirlwind pleasure-seeking, but the film is so repetitive and exhausting on its long, long path to the finish that it’s hard to decide whether or not it was worth it. A lot of time is spent in vans and motel parking lots with these aimless, stoned-out youths, almost all of them interchangeable and unbearable to be around for more than four consecutive seconds; with amateurs filling out much of the supporting cast, authenticity may run high, but so, too, does squalid incoherence (it’s not hard to guess that the majority of the dialogue was improvised). Lane emerges as a fresh talent in her film debut, at least, and she holds the flawed film together as it ambles its way toward an ambiguously uplifting finale, blurring the line between optimism and delusion. Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Jury Prize.

56/100