Shia LaBeouf’s Rat Tail Seduces Homeless Women In R-Rated Netflix Road Drama

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 hour ago

I hated every single minute of American Honey (2016), and it’s rare for me to find zero redeeming qualities in a film. It’s not that it’s objectively terrible. A quick trip to Rotten Tomatoes, where it holds a 79 percent approval rating, does all the heavy lifting there. It’s 163 minutes of a young woman trying to find herself while selling magazines with a bunch of other wanderers, but something about this one really rubbed me the wrong way.

I think the problem I have with American Honey is that there’s no real goal or dream to latch onto. It’s static, and while that was probably writer-director Andrea Arnold’s intention, it didn’t land for me. I’m just not the right audience for this kind of movie. I like straightforward storytelling, and American Honey is pure slice of life. I don’t hate slice-of-life outings, but I still need some kind of goal, moral, or takeaway, and I never found one here.

This could have been distilled into 90 minutes and been just as effective. Even then, I don’t think I’d feel any differently about American Honey. I had the same reaction to Nomadland, so take that for what it’s worth.

Nearly 3 Hours Of Nothing Much At All

American Honey centers on Star (Sasha Lane). She lives in Oklahoma with her abusive father and acts as the primary caretaker for her younger siblings. She dumpster dives for food and lives a miserable life. You want to root for her because she’s clearly been dealt a bad hand and wants something better. She could take night classes a library, crash with a friend while getting on her feet, find a shelter in another town to escape her abusive family while still keeping tabs on her siblings from a safe but reachable distance. It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s doable.

Instead, Star meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf with a hideous rat tail haircut), who likes causing scenes while dancing at K-Mart. Their eyes lock and she’s instantly smitten. She abandons her siblings because she’s completely sold on becoming a traveling magazine sales person with Jake and his ragtag group of miscreants, led by the super sexy but manipulative Krystal (Riley Keough).

Here’s how the rest of American Honey plays out. Jake trains Star in sales. Star doesn’t like how Jake lies during his door-to-door pitches because it says everything you need to know about his moral compass. Star and Jake fall in love, or at least Star thinks they do. Krystal gets mad that Jake’s numbers are slipping since Star joined the crew. Krystal makes Jake massage her with lotion in a motel room while Star watches, marking her territory in what her mind is the most humiliating way possible.

Day after day, Star gets in the van, wakes up in a new state, and repeats the cycle. She sells a ton of “subscriptions,” but she’s really just running a game on a string of male suitors. She never fully commits to prostitution, but she plays the part just enough to make a disportionate amount cash for her exploits under the guise of working a low-level sales scam job. Shia LaBeouf’s rat tail flaps gently in the breeze when he admits he’s been stealing valuables from every house he enters. Star and Jake roll around in the grass, people get betrayed, more magazines are sold. Yawn.

You Can Trace The Origin Of The First Time Machine To Somebody Trying To Stop This Movie From Being Made

Call me old fashioned, but I like my movies to tell a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s straight-forward, esoteric, non-linear, or fragmented. There still needs to be something holding it all together. At its core, American Honey uses its slice-of-life approach to show Star’s struggles, but we only get fleeting glimpses of where she came from and where she might be going. I understand that this is probably the point, and that I’m just not picking up what it’s throwing down, but it frustrated me because there’s some interesting stuff happening throughout, but we only see it on a surface level. Probably another intentional artistic choice. It’s a subversive way to deliver social commentary on this kind of lifestyle, but this movie screams to be more visceral and cathartic by latching onto something tangible. It doesn’t do that, so it feels like a complete waste of time.

Star is a complex character, shaped by her unstable upbringing. The same could be said for everyone she’s working with as they bounce between motels and sell subscriptions just to scrape together a per diem and party their way through their teens and 20s. Everyone is running from something, and whatever that something is must be bad enough for this life to feel like a better option. Most of these characters are probably trying to be good people, even if their instincts are completely misguided. That’s what’s interesting to me. Watching them all operate in this kind of limbo for a prolonged period of time is a disservice to the kind of resilience that’s being actively celebrated in American Honey.

Except for Jake. He’s in full-on chode mode for the entire movie, and every single scene he’s in makes me wish time moved faster.

My disappointment with American Honey comes from how many compelling stories are sitting right there in front of you, but always just slightly out of reach. Every character has some idiosyncracy worth exploring, but instead we get a long sizzle reel of their antics as a collective. Even as a sizzle reel, it still clocks in at nearly three hours. The whole thing feels like young-adult nomad porn; the kind of fantasy about running away you have when you’re 15, when all you think you need to survive is the prospect of dry humping and occasionally blowing up bottle rockets.

American Honey is streaming on Netflix. Watch it. Or don’t. I don’t care.