American Honey isn’t a feel-good road trip movie. It’s a portrait of lost youth with no safety net.
The screenwriter Andrea Arnold strips the American dream down to its bones and shows what’s left when guidance, stability, and protection are missing. This is freedom born from neglect, not choice.
The film is about a mixed-race teenage girl named Star who is living an impoverished life in Oklahoma, dumpster diving and hitchhiking with her young half siblings and enduring sexual abuse at the hands of her alcoholic step-father. One day, while at the local Kmart, she encounters a young man named Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who is with a group of young adults traveling together as part of a magazine sales crew making money.
Drawn to each other, though more so on Star’s side, Jake invites her to travel with the crew to Kansas City. She initially declines out of guilt, but the offer never leaves her mind. By morning, it feels less like a choice and more like the only exit available to her. She tracks down her absent mother, leaves her half siblings behind, and finds the magazine crew, choosing escape over the tumultuous life she had been enduring.
The magazine crew markets itself as adventure, but it’s closer to a traveling survival system. Long days, manipulation disguised as motivation, blurred boundaries, and just enough money to keep everyone dependent. It’s capitalism at its most intimate, extracting labor from kids who don’t yet realize they’re being used.
One of the film’s strongest sources of realism lies in its casting. Beyond LaBeouf, Keough, and a few others, the film relied almost entirely on street casting during pre production, young people were approached on beaches, sidewalks, parking lots, and construction sites including the main character Star. And may I say, for her very first film, she was not half bad.
This is a real gamble that often exposes awkwardness or self-conscious performances, but the result was quite the opposite. Nothing feels acted.
The performances are so raw and unpolished that it often feels like eavesdropping on a real magazine crew that are traveling through the Midwest, not watching a film at all. Only an experience.
Star’s relationship with Jake is not romantic, it’s transactional. Desire, attention, escape, validation, these are the currencies being exchanged. Shia LaBeouf plays Jake as a walking red flag wrapped in charisma, the kind of man who feels like oxygen when you’re starving and poison once you’ve had enough air. He offers just enough affection to keep Star chasing, never enough to let her feel secure.
What makes the film unsettling is how normal all of this feels. The cramped vans, the performative hype, the fleeting highs, the constant movement with no destination. There’s no villain here, just systems that quietly fail young people and then blame them for coping badly.
The soundtrack blares like emotional anesthesia. At first, the music feels like it’s creating a bonding atmosphere between the crew, moments of connection and shared escape. But as the film unfolds, it shifts into something else entirely, dissociation. It fills the silence so no one has to sit with how empty this life really is. What once felt like dancing and laughter slowly reveals itself as survival rituals, ways to stay moving, distracted, and numb.
Visually, the film refuses distance. The tight frame traps you with these characters, no wide shots to escape into, no romantic horizons. America looks tired, indifferent, and hollow. Every door Star knocks on reveals a different version of excess or indifference, reminding her exactly where she doesn’t belong.
It doesn’t offer growth, healing, or closure. It ends the way many real lives do, still moving, still unresolved, still caught between staying and leaving. The film’s honesty is pretty brutal. It doesn’t glamorize lost youth at all, it exposes how easily it can be exploited when no one is watching.
This isn’t a love story. It’s a warning.
Honestly, Vanessa 