Well, that didn’t take long. Just 24 hours or so after President Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate, Netflix’s feature film adaptation of Vance’s 2018 memoir Hillbilly Elegy has re-entered the streaming giant’s Top 10 list of the most-watched movies in the US.
As of this writing, the movie directed by Ron Howard — and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams — is sitting at #4 on Netflix’s daily top movies chart (it moved up to #2 on Thursday, the final night of the RNC). As an aside, that wasn’t enough time for Hillbilly Elegy to show up on Netflix’s global Top 10 movies chart, which gets updated every Tuesday. Which is why it will be especially interesting to see if enough people went in search of the movie worldwide that it ends up ranking globally.
For that, we’ll have to wait until July 24.
About the movie itself: Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of how Vance’s grandparents in postwar America were “dirt poor and in love,” and how they moved from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in an attempt to evade the poverty all around them. They ended up raising a middle-class family, and one of their grandchildren (Vance) would go on to graduate from Yale Law School.
The movie brings all that to life, with Vance portrayed by Gabriel Basso (who also stars in the Netflix series The Night Agent). Adams portrays Bev, his mother who struggles with addiction, while Vance’s resilient and iron-willed grandmother is played by Close. At the heart of Hillbilly Elegy, both the book and the Netflix movie, are how Vance’s family grapples with various problems like alcoholism and poverty.
Also worth noting, Netflix released the movie early on during the Covid pandemic, in 2020. Because of that, we were all focused, shall we say, on other things at the time. The movie didn’t get the attention then that it probably should have, but Vance’s inclusion on the 2024 Republican presidential ticket means that it absolutely is getting that attention now.
It should also be said that both the book and the movie version are not without controversy, which you can read more about here.
