The directionless euphoria of Andrea Arnold’s road movie American Honey is sometimes drowsy, sometimes hyperactive: it entered my bloodstream more fully now than when I saw it the first time, earlier this year. Star, played by Sasha Lane, is a dirt-poor teenager with nothing to lose who joins a travelling gang roaming the country selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, living in shared motel rooms, partying, drinking, fighting, playing loud music, and making extra money in each town selling sex or stealing from the customers’ houses where they have been unwisely allowed in.

The faces are extraordinary: pretty/unpretty, with the hard mask-like blank of youth, guys with powerful bodies like loaded weapons, scribbled on with tattoos. Star falls in love with the crew’s top salesman, motormouth predator Jake (Shia LaBeouf), to the simmering rage of Jake’s girlfriend, queen-bee crew manager Krystal, a tremendous performance from Riley Keough.

I still think that at times this film, Arnold’s first set in the US, looks a bit self-conscious in its learned Americanness and white-trash milieu, like a very accomplished pastiche homage to Larry Clark, Harmony Korine or the Gus Van Sant of Elephant: it’s presented in the austerely boxy aspect ratio of 4:3, to emphasise single shots and closeups. LaBeouf’s scenery-chewing, furniture-smashing performance could have been reined in more, and it is incidentally not believable that you can steal a Buick convertible belonging to three cowboys after shooting up their backyard pool patio without the police getting involved.

American Honey is a movie in search of an ending and in search of a meaning. But the search is the point, or rather the point is taking the journey and realising afterwards that it has been a search, or even in fact not fully realising. And Arnold’s ambition and reach are really exciting: the way she immerses you in the mood and the moment, letting her characters drift to the edge of chaos, capable of investing the least little thing with reportage poetry. She finds some great unprofessional cameos, including a glorious appearance from a little girl whose favourite song is the Dead Kennedys’ I Kill Children. Arnold also has this year’s zeitgeist bragging rights for making cocky Jake compare his own dress sense to that of his hero: Donald Trump. (Was that an improvised line from LaBeouf?) As in a reality TV show, the week’s two lowest-earning salespersons have to fight it out in some nearby waste ground.

Living on the edge … American Honey. Photograph: Allstar/Film4

A second viewing alerted me to the pattern of visual echoes and internal rhymes. When Star and the others arrive in Kansas City, one claims, awestruck, that this is where Superman lives. And a few minutes later, we see someone’s dog by the roadside, dressed up in a cape and red Superdog pants. The title is taken from Lady Antebellum’s country song American Honey, which is mentioned at the beginning and sung by the crew at the end. The first time round I found it moving but was then fractionally disconcerted by the fact that this song does not lead straight into the closing credits. Now I can see how that would have been too on-the-nose.

LaBeouf’s Jake is a sleek sociopath with a brazen genius for selling, spinning new lies for each customer for the hell of it, keeping them talking and refusing to notice how he is offending or failing to convince. The scene in which he and Star are permitted into the home of an upright Christian woman whose teen daughter is sexily dancing with her friends in the yard is a masterclass in tension. So is the one where haughty and jealous Krystal, in her confederate-flag bikini, summons Star into her motel room and humiliates Jake by making him rub suncream all over her while she gives Star a managerial dressing down.

Arnold is known for Brit social-realist gems such as Red Road and Fish Tank and for her masterpiece: the much-misunderstood Wuthering Heights, which in its raw, radical simplicity appeared to predate the literary work. And American Honey? It’s not social realism in the British sense; maybe it’s closer to New Wave, a nouvelle vague americaine with its youth, sex and outlaw freedom. Selling magazine subscriptions? Is that like Jean Seberg selling the New York Herald Tribune in Godard’s Breathless? There is a great performance here from Sasha Lane and this is another step onwards and upwards for Andrea Arnold herself.