Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy a Ron Howard Film

An urgent phone call pulls a Yale Law student back to his Ohio hometown where he reflects on three generations of family history and his own future.

J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso) a former Marine from southern Ohio and current Yale Law student is on the verge of landing his dream job when a family crisis forces him to return to the home he's tried to forget. J.D. must navigate the complex dynamics of his Appalachian family including his volatile relationship with his mother Bev (Amy Adams) who's struggling with addiction. Fueled by memories of his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) the resilient and whip-smart woman who raised him J.D. comes to embrace his family's indelible imprint on his own personal journey.

Based on J.D. Vance's #1 New York Times Bestseller and directed by Academy Award winner Ron Howard HILLBILLY ELEGY is a powerful personal memoir that offers a window into one family's personal journey of survival and triumph. By following three colorful generations through their unique struggles J.D.'s family story explores the highs and lows that define his family's experience.

Starring:Amy Adams Glenn Close Gabriel Basso

Hillbilly Elegy | Official Trailer

Official Trailer | Netflix

REVIEW: Hillbilly Elegy

(M) 115 minutes In cinemas now + Netflix

When J.D. Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016 it was greeted by some as a window to the grievances and deprivations that have gone into the makings of the Trump voter. He argued that white working-class discontent in America was caused not only by poverty and disadvantage but by a " learned helplessness' ' which had drained away energy and ambition down the generations.

It was a theory that set off some loud alarm signals and those who didn't agree were quick to say so. Vance they claimed had used his own experiences as a poor white kid growing up in the Appalachians and the Ohio rust belt to reach a flawed conclusion about all such families under pressure.

But detractors and admirers all read the memoir turning it into a provocative bestseller and a book Hollywood had to have. The rights eventually went to two of the industry's most prominent names - director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer. And the result is a typical Howard movie. The book's hard political edges have been planed away leaving a highly polished piece of storytelling in the great Hollywood tradition of working-class soaps.

There are still traces of politics. You can find them in the string of doomed hopes and the surrender to addiction and alcoholism that stain the Vance family history but you're left to make up your own mind about the reasons for these failures. Howard has always been fascinated by the shifts and patterns that shape family life and this is the prism through which he and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor view the story.

J.D. (Owen Asztalos) is 14 when we first meet him and the most powerful people in his orbit are women - his mother Bev (Amy Adams) who is bright funny and dangerously volatile especially when she's in the grip of the drugs she takes in an effort to dull the effects of her many disappointments; his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) who's about to escape into an early marriage; and his grandmother Mamaw (a barely recognisable Glenn Close).

It's Mamaw who sets him on the course that will take him to Yale law school with her distinctive variety of tough love. And Close embraces the role with gusto. With a limp a stoop and an ever-burning cigarette clamped between her teeth she strips his future down to the basics with a stream of advice flavoured by her gift for the aphorism and her inventive way with four-letter words.

And Adams is a match for her catching Bev's sweetness along with the speed and suddenness of her emotional gear changes. This leaves Asztalos and Gabriel Busso who's cast as the adult J.D. to play the straight man but they're never overshadowed.

Fans of the book are already complaining the film blunts its keenest insights and they're right. Yet there's a lot to be said for Howard's high-end brand of commercial movie-making . He has a sure feel for narrative rhythms and here he's to be applauded just for inviting Close with her wealth of imagination and technique to give us everything she has.

Sandra Hall