Like a never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show: Hillbilly Elegy reviewed

Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story. He was brought up in the American rust belt amid poverty, violence, addiction, trash heaps, burning cars, hopelessness and, on top of all that, a grandma who, we now know, was the spit of Catherine Tate’s Nan. (It’s Glenn Close, but check it out.) Still, if you can get past Nan — if, if — this film should be an emotionally stirring and moving account of, ultimately, achieving the American dream. (Vance went on to Yale and became a successful investment banker.) But as directed by Ron Howard it isn’t any of that. Instead, this is like being trapped in a seemingly never-ending episode of The Jerry Springer Show.

Hillbilly Elegy is as badly constructed as it is badly directed, although the two may amount to the same thing. It’s told in flashbacks so it’s back and forth, back and forth, back, back, back, forth, forth, forth, with no fluidity whatsoever.