**American Honey (2016)**_Directed by Andrea Arnold_This is Jack Kerouac for the Millennial generation, the first cohort that can t buy houses, can t find meaningful work, and stares directly into a hopeless, dystopian future with no illusions left. American Honey joins a lineage of films about economic desperation and systemic abandonment — Dogville, Requiem for a Dream, Parasite, for example. But where those films found formal inventiveness or narrative urgency, Andrea Arnold s road movie drowns in its own sprawl.I was genuinely looking forward to this, coming from the auteur who gave us Bird and Fish Tank, films that knew exactly how long they needed to be and what they were saying. American Honey is disappointing precisely because Arnold s talent is visible throughout, but buried under bloat.Sasha Lane, in her debut, did a fabulous job. She plays Star with raw authenticity, no actorly affectation, just survival and hunger and the desperate hope that maybe this van full of misfits is better than what she s leaving behind. The soundtrack is awesome, lots of fun, capturing the manic energy of kids trying to party away the void.But the film is 163 minutes long, and that s the problem. By the end of Act I, we understand the thesis: these kids use the endless party as anesthesia for millennial symptoms, the road trip as escape from a country that has nothing to offer them. Once that s established, there s no reason to dwell on it for another hour and a half. It feels like Arnold couldn t figure out how to resolve the love story between Star and Jake (Shia LaBeouf) early enough, so we re forced to watch repetitive scenes of scamming, partying, and emotional yo-yoing until she finally found an ending.The magazine crew itself is exploitation, a scam targeting both the kids selling and the people buying, and Arnold captures that vividly. But a film about exploitation shouldn t exploit the audience s patience. What could have been a tight, devastating 100-minute portrait becomes an endurance test. By the time the resolution arrives, I stopped caring.