A troubled teenager ends up at Yale Law School thanks to his eccentric grandmother in this adaptation of JD Vance’s bestselling memoir
Ron Howard’s new movie, based on the bestselling memoir by JD Vance, is a solemn true story of self-betterment from tough beginnings, weirdly like the “personal statement” that an
American teenager would put on an application to an Ivy League college.
It’s not quite an “elegy” because the “hillbilly” world – which is shown as painful, raucous but emotionally authentic – is supposed to be very much alive, as is the hero’s connection with it. And he’s not about to forget his roots. But then again, this hillbilly world (the world of the hill country of Jackson, Kentucky) is something that the hero doesn’t have much personal connection with. It’s more the world of his grandparents and great-grandparents. He goes back to their home for family reunions but was born and raised in the less picturesque, though equally disadvantaged world of Middletown, Ohio.