Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the Memoir and Movie That Made Trump’s VP Pick J.D. Vance the Hero

“I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life,” J.D. Vance writes in the introduction to his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, “certainly nothing that would justify a complete stranger paying money to read about it.” But with news that Donald Trump has tapped Vance to be his running mate, interest in the Ohio senator’s life and career—as well as the poorly received film adaptation of his memoir, which reportedly prompted Vance’s rightward tilt—has certainly spiked.

Vance first had the national spotlight trained on him when he published his book in 2016, not long before Trump was elected. In it, Vance reflects on his childhood in Middletown, Ohio, in a community at times ravaged by poverty and opioid addiction, as well as his self-appointed “hillbilly identity,” by way of his Appalachian grandparents in Jackson, Kentucky.

Though at the time he declared himself a “Never Trump guy,” Vance’s memoir was used to decipher how Trump had clinched the vote of poor, white America. “Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it,” tweeted Larry Summers, former treasury secretary of Bill Clinton and president of Harvard. But others prickled at Vance’s tendency to paint the Appalachian region in broad strokes. The New Republic’s Sarah Jones referred to Vance as “the False Prophet of Blue State America,” also known as “liberal media’s favorite white trash-splainer.” The week of Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Hillbilly Elegy sat atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.

Just as The Apprentice made Trump palatable for American audiences, his running mate was given his own Hollywood vehicle when Hillbilly Elegy was adapted into a 2020 film. Directed by Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) and written by Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water), the movie follows Vance (played by Gabriel Basso and Owen Asztalos at various ages) as he travels from Yale back to his humble hometown amid familial strife between his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close) and mother Bev (Amy Adams). (Vanity Fair has reached out to reps for Howard, Taylor, Adams, and Close for comment.)

Although the movie was released on Netflix only a week after the 2020 presidential election, it strips away most of the political context of Vance’s book, from his own right-of-center leanings to the fact that Mamaw and Papaw were union Democrats (other than the time Papaw voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984). It also ends with a local-boy-makes-good spin that focuses on Vance’s ability to break out of the Rust Belt, start a family, and graduate Yale Law School. There is no mention of his future as a venture capitalist under the wing of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign.

“I expect the movie will do very well in Middle America, the Rust Belt and the South,” American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the movie’s release. “I am much less sure about coastal audiences. . . I sense that enough time has passed since the book’s publication that a lot of Blue State folks are going to intuitively associate the story with Trump, and come to it with a grudge, if they come to it at all.”

In the same story, WME partner Anna DeRoy, who represented Vance, said: “If you’re going to make a family drama and you’re going to cast movie stars, you’re going to make it about the characters. The political stuff is in there, but it’s subtle.” (It appears that DeRoy no longer represents Vance.)

Reception of the film was decidedly negative. The Atlantic called it “one of the worst movies of the year,” while Forbes labeled it “poverty porn.” Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson dubbed the movie “shameless Oscar bait” and criticized its “failure to interrogate any of the book’s controversial insinuations.”

When asked about the criticism on CBS This Morning, Howard said: “I do feel like [critics are] looking at political thematics that they may or may not agree with, that honestly aren’t really reflected or aren’t front-and-center in this story. What I saw was a family drama that could be very relatable. Yes, culturally specific, and if you’re fascinated by that, I hope you find it interesting. If you’re from the region, I hope you find it authentic, because that was our aim and effort. But I felt it was a bridge to understanding that we’re more alike than we are different.”

The film’s stars largely sidestepped the controversy. Close told NME that the movie “wasn’t made with politics in mind, it was made with Ron’s intent. I think he succeeded magnificently to tell the story of a very specific family.” Adams said that, “the universality of the themes of the movie far transcend politics.”

In November 2020, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted that “the movie was probably greenlit in the first wave of ‘this might explain Trump’ feeling from Hollywood. By the time it came out, the revisionists had won the conversation in the media. So the movie became Bad along with the book.” But much of the backlash was rooted in the implications of Vance’s “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative, which characterized poverty as a cultural, individualized issue, rather than a systemic problem. Vance has “wiped away his survivor’s guilt with a false narrative fueled by conservative nonsense as poisonous to the region as the coal itself,” wrote Tracey Moore for Vanity Fair in 2020.

She continued: “Hillbilly Elegy, both the film and the memoir it’s based on, is the story of a guy who did turn this thing around, but only for himself. He drew attention to the problems of the region, just the wrong kind of attention. That is to say, Vance Trojan-horsed us, first painting a sympathetic portrait of his impoverished family and region, only to dubiously credit personal responsibility for his success, and a lack of it for everybody else’s stagnation. It’s a blame-the-victim conclusion that allows Vance and his readers to gawk at and pity the poor white trash, but ultimately wash their hands of it all and walk away.”

Controversy aside, the film was nominated for two Academy Awards—including one for the oft-nominated, but never-victorious Close for best supporting actress. Industry support was far from widespread, however. That same year, Close became only the third person in history to earn an Oscar nod and a Razzie nod for the same performance. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Hillbilly Elegy had the worst critical response for a film with a nominated performance in almost 30 years—earning a paltry 25% critical score. It fared much better with audiences, at 82%. In 2022, Howard noted that “Audience reactions were good,” in test screenings, telling The Daily Beast, “With that film, as you well know, reviewers and others were tougher on it.”) Close lost her eighth nomination—this time to Minari’s Yuh-Jung Youn—and Vance’s friend later told The Washington Post that negative reaction to the film was the “last straw” regarding his connection to liberal elites.

By 2022, Vance had publicly embraced Trump and, in turn, Trump endorsed Vance in his U.S. Senate race against Democrat Tim Ryan. In his victory speech for the seat, which was vacated by Republican Rob Portman, Vance thanked his Mamaw. “You’re not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you’re not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate,” he said, “but I will never forget the woman who raised me.”

That same year, Howard, a longtime Democrat, expressed his surprise over Vance’s political trajectory. “When I was getting to know JD, we didn’t talk politics because I wasn’t interested in that about his life,” Howard told Variety in 2022. “I was interested in his childhood and navigating the particulars of his family and his culture so that’s what we focused on in our conversation. He struck me as a very moderate center-right kind of guy.”

The filmmaker also noted Vance’s then-distaste for his now-running mate. “He didn’t care for Trump,” said Howard. “He didn’t like him at all, as he tweeted.” Back when they were working on the film, Vance had no firm plans to run for office. “I asked him about it, he said, ‘Maybe someday down the road,’” Howard recalled. “Someday came a little sooner than any of us expected.”