Hillbilly Elegy

A Yale Law student is called home to Ohio by a family emergency, returning to the Appalachian community he had worked to leave behind. There he reckons with the troubled history of his family and with his relationship with his mother, who is struggling with addiction. Much of what steadies him comes from his grandmother, the tough and sharp-witted woman who raised him, and through her memories he comes to see that accepting where he comes from is part of building a future. The film is based on J.D. Vance's memoir of the same name.

Ron Howard directed, working from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, with Brian Grazer, Howard and Karen Lunder producing for Imagine Entertainment. It is Howard's twenty-seventh feature as director, following Solo: A Star Wars Story and preceding Thirteen Lives. Amy Adams plays Bev, Glenn Close plays Mamaw, Gabriel Basso plays J.D. Vance, and Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto and Bo Hopkins appear among a credited cast of ninety-four.

The film runs 117 minutes. Audience scores agree with each other on IMDb, where it holds 6.7 from around 61,000 votes, and on TMDB, where it also sits at 6.7, though from roughly a thousand votes. Critics were markedly less favourable, giving it 4.6 out of 10 across 260 reviews.