“When they talked to me, I was like, ‘Are you sure it’s not a porno? Because I’m not down with that,’” said Raymond Coalson, 22, whom Ms. Arnold met at a county fair in West Virginia. “We didn’t know where we were going, what we were doing, who was coming; there was always new people, places.”  McCaul Lombardi, 25, one of the few who had previous credits, said: “If Andrea was here right now, she’d tell you that what she was looking for was ‘the light being on’ in people. It’s not like she was like, ‘Oh, I need you guys to say this, or do this,’ because if it was happening, most people wouldn’t even listen. It was organized chaos.”  Ms. Arnold explained that she had written “not terribly specific characters” and that the actors were hired based on those descriptions. “But then, because we’re casting real people, when they came, they were being themselves,” she said. “They rebelled against a lot of anything that was too controlling.”  The mag crew’s rapport is a large part of the narrative. Riley Keough (“Mad Max: Fury Road” and the Starz series “The Girlfriend Experience”) plays the team’s coldly detached leader, who makes the two lowest earners fight each other each week. Ms. Arnold juxtaposes images of highways and open spaces, leafy neighborhoods and seedy motels, with drinking and drug use, set to a soundtrack of contemporary hip-hop (Kevin Gates, Juicy J) and pop (Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and Lady Antebellum’s song from which the film takes its title).  To shoot scenes for the film’s other thread, Star’s evolution and her romance with Jake (Mr. LaBeouf), Ms. Arnold pulled Ms. Lane aside for extended periods, which left the remaining cast members to their own devices. Perhaps for the benefit of the onscreen chemistry (and to the film crew’s torment), the down time seems to have been a bit like “Lord of the Flies.”  “I shot a porcupine with a 9-mill,” said Dakota Powers, 18, whom Ms. Arnold found in the parking lot of a nightclub in Panama City Beach, Fla., and who became the self-proclaimed ringleader of a series of superglue pranks on the cast and crew.  “They superglued my hand to my face,” said Isaiah Stone, 21, whose credits include “Winter’s Bone” (2010). “I’d wake up, my hair was superglued.”  Mr. Coalson remembered one of the producers, Lars Knudsen, “walking around worried — he’s like, ‘Oh God, one of them is going to die, where’d they go? What are they doing?’”  In much of Ms. Arnold’s work, her eye often trains itself on small details: flower petals or tree branches scraping against windows. And “American Honey” has no shortage of images ripe with metaphor — insects trapped against windows, a ditch full of blood, a trio of monochromatic cowboys in a Cadillac.  “When they showed up on the day, with their white hats and their white car, I just thought: What is that? That’s just come out of my head — it’s like out of a David Lynch film,” Ms. Arnold recalled, laughing. “It’s coming from somewhere, and I’m sure lots of people will make some kind of — I’m looking forward to seeing all the more in-depth interpretations, because they’ll probably teach me a thing or two.”  Less open to interpretation is the film’s portrayal of American poverty and its effects. The opening scene takes place in a Dumpster, with Star scrounging for food, and the mag crew travels through a number of economically depressed towns and neighborhoods. Even without back stories, the film’s peripheral characters — a truck driver, an oil worker (played by an oil worker Ms. Arnold met at a Walmart in North Dakota), the neglected children of a drug addict — are fragments of poor, white America. And as transients, the fictional mag crew members themselves have no place in society.  “It’s an English director, but you have the most American kids as the cast — you have America as the cast,” Mr. Lombardi said. “We were showing the youth that’s forgot about.”  It’s not a political film, per se, but it is difficult not to view it as prescient. So as the surreal American election barrels tumultuously toward a conclusion, perhaps an outsider can most accurately portray the culture that produced it.  “If I’m making something, it’s going to be influenced by me and what I’ve seen,” Ms. Arnold said. “It’s never going to be like a huge truth, because everyone’s truth is different. I’ve experienced America in a completely different way to anybody else, so it’s going to be my version.”  A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2016, on page AR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Open Highways, Free Spirits. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
While shooting the director Andrea Arnold’s film, the cast and crew traveled together for nearly three months, from Oklahoma to North Dakota.