After J.D. Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate this week, “Hillbilly Elegy” is toping various charts across multiple services.
Vance’s 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” is currently taking up both of the Top 2 spots on Amazon’s bestsellers list in paperback and hardcover, respectively.
Elsewhere, Ron Howard’s 2020 film based on the book sits at No. 4 on Netflix’s Top 10 movies list as of Wednesday (it was sixth on the list Tuesday). According to analytics platform Luminate, the movie saw a 1,180% increase in viewership after Vance was selected on Monday.
The movie stars Academy Award nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close and follows a former Marine from southern Ohio-turned-Yale Law student who 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. His tumultuous, impoverished upbringing centered heavily on a mother (Adams) who as an addict could not keep her demons at bay.
TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde reviewed the film as “less like the exploration of a life or an evocation of a time and place and more like an informercial for J.D. Vance, who is more salt-of-the-earth than those snooty lawyers, but also manages not to fall into the traps of ignorance and poverty and addiction that befall so many of the people with whom he grew up.”
The review added, critically, that it “isn’t interested in the systems that create poverty and addiction and ignorance; it just wants to pretend that one straight white guy’s ability to rise above his surroundings means that there’s no excuse for everyone else not to have done so as well.”
Close was nominated at the Oscars that year for her supporting performance as Vance’s grandmother. That nomination was echoed at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards, but it wasn’t all accolades for the her turn: She was also nominated for Worst Supporting Actress at the Razzie Awards. The film received two other Razzie nominations — Worst Director for Howard and Worst Screenplay for Vanessa Taylor (however, Adams also got a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Female Actor in a Leading Role).
“This is a Ron Howard production, so the pieces do at least fit together with ease. Legendary cinematographer Maryse Alberti aptly captures the various locations, from the leafy campuses of New Haven to the grim fluorescents of a shabby motel bathroom, while editor James Wilcox allows the audience to pinball backwards and forwards through J.D.’s life without losing the thread,” TheWrap’s review concluded.
Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate for the state of Ohio in 2023.
“Hillbilly Elegy” is available to stream on Netflix.
