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# Hillbilly Elegy Tries, and Fails, to Understand the Working Class
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/hillbilly-elegy-netflix-jd-vance/
- Published: 2020-11-26T17:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:06:16.000Z
- Description: Based on the memoir by J.D. Vance, this film adaptation is the latest big piece of Hollywood poverty porn disguised as Oscar bait.
- Author: Dan Schindel
- Tags: Film, Capsule Reviews, Netflix, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 09:08 (2019, 2020, part 3)

In 2016 *Hillbilly Elegy*, J.D. Vance's memoir of growing up in rural Ohio, became a bestseller in no small part due to the idea that [it could "explain" the average Trump voter to liberals](https://www.vogue.com/article/hillbilly-elegy-author-jd-vance-on-trump?ref=hyperallergic.com) who were confused and frightened by his political rise. Now we don't have time to unpack all the assumptions there (\* *cough\** Trump's base is in fact just the Republican Party, which skews very strongly middle and upper class \* *cough*\*), but it makes all too much sense for that book to become the most Oscar-baiting movie of this year. Hollywood actors, after all, love nothing more than demonstrating their authenticity and skill by playacting at poverty.

And so *Hillbilly Elegy* the movie has Amy Adams and Glenn Close putting on some of the most extra performances of the year. Amy Adams plays Vance’s drug-addicted mother, while Glenn Close is his tough-love-homespun-wisdom-dispensing grandmother. If this were a parody of condescending poverty porn films, I'm not wholly sure what it would do differently; every performance is keyed to the most hysterical, ridiculous register. If you badly want to understand Appalachians, maybe just talk to a few instead?

[Hillbilly Elegy](https://www.netflix.com/title/81071970?ref=hyperallergic.com) *is now available to stream on Netflix.*