Some movies just cling to you, with the images and the exhilaration coming back in gorgeous flashes long after you’ve left the theater — and British director Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, was something to truly remember. At once rambling and bursting with energy, it’s the sincere, vulnerable window into the youth of America that Spring Breakers, with its aggressive crime-spree posturing (and James Franco tomfoolery) never could be. We join 18-year-old Star (electric newcomer Sasha Lane) as she abandons her enervating life in small-town Oklahoma to take up with a crew of wayward young people drinking, fucking, and scamming their way from town to town and state to state selling magazine subscriptions that no one wants — but also hoping for something better.
Leading Star on her road trip of exhilaration and destruction are Shia LaBeouf, in a career-best performance as a rat-tailed rabble-rouser, and The Girlfriend Experience’s Riley Keough, who plays the group’s dictatorial ringleader in a Confederate-flag bikini. The first trailer, below, won’t tell you that the movie is 162 minutes or that Arnold sometimes cranks up the pulsating pop soundtrack to something like a musical, such as when Star meets the gang dancing to Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s “We Found Love†in the aisles of a Walmart. Instead, that and the new narration-heavy trailer, above, embody the profoundness of finding love in a hopeless place and the spirit of dreaming big. American Honey will be released in the U.S. on September 30. Tell LaBeouf to add it to his movie marathon.