'American Honey' Review: Shia LaBeouf and Sasha Lane are sensational!

8.4/10

Written and Directed by the British filmmaker Andrea Arnold

Starring: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough

This shimmering, raw, hip-hop hymnal of a film by Andrea Arnold is an American tale that is beautifully original. It's also a road trip movie that puts brilliant but troubled Shia LaBeouf back on the comeback trail as an actor.

Star (Sasha Lane) is an 18-year-old from a harsh, impoverished home who runs away with a hard-drinking, pot-toking group of door-to-door magazine salespeople. They drive around the middle parts of the country in a van, stopping in places rich, poor, broken and busted, trying to sign people up for little-desired subscriptions. Star soon finds herself falling hard for the volatile Jake (Shia LaBeouf). Their tumultuous affair is part lust, part chaos, and frantically young and jagged.

Perhaps only Elvis' granddaughter could be the leader of this gritty group of misfits. And so it is with Riley Keough, perfectly cast as a trashy but beautiful hard-nut named Krystal who wears her bikini like it's a weapon, the queen bee of every cheap hotel, motel, holiday inn the group checks into on their never-ending tour of an America that you usually only see if you jump in your car and drive around it yourself.

When watching "American Honey" it makes the viewer feels he or she is looking at life through some perfectly clear lens. The actors have not been coaxed into acting. They have somehow been made to feel safe enough to show a side of their humanity that is normally hidden away.

From Arielle Holmes as the Darth Vader-obsessed Pagan to Veronica Ezell as Star's emotive seatmate, these are performances that occasionally seem like prayers to some broken but still beating American heart.

The film slowly, slowly, slowly blossoms into an emotional wildflower by the end, leaving us with a scene that is kind of a spontaneous road baptism (which to be honest i didn't completely grasp at first sight), an unsure note of spiritual birth.