Hillbilly Elegy, based on a person’s actual memoir, is trying to say something profound about desperate, poor white folk in Kentucky and Southern Ohio… but it never really figures out what. There’s reference and asides about boarded up main streets and drug addiction… but the message seems to be to walk away. Or possibly just pointing fingers and saying “See all the hilljacks?”

The curious thing about the flick is that I think they filmed the wrong part of the story. The structure of the film is a series of flashbacks to the author in his youth, dealing with his drug dependent (and very smart) mother (played by Amy Adams) and his grandmother (played by Glenn Close) and his attempts to make something of himself at Yale (and continue to deal with his drug dependent mother). It’s so focused on this random flashback structure, it never really deals with the part of the story I found most interesting… his attempts to assimilate with the the military and/or with Yale. That was more interesting to me, possibly because it was about something, or at least more than wallowing in the plight of the downtrodden (or something).

The movie is well acted and looks good enough so it’s not a disaster… it’s just not compelling enough for a two hour runtime. I can’t yell at it say it’s not covering the “interesting” parts of a guy’s real life since maybe nothing interesting happened in the unfilmed bits. Maybe his autobiography found all the interesting stuff in his flashbacks and whatnot. Fair enough for him, less interesting for me.

Score: 74