Millions of Americans Are Streaming Hillbilly Elegy . Too Bad for J.D. Vance.

The American electorate has spent the days since he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the vice presidency getting to know J.D. Vance. And that hasn’t worked out well for J.D. Vance. Despite Vance only narrowly defeating his Democratic opponent in an increasingly red state that Trump won twice, his 2022 election to the Senate confirmed him as a rising star of the right, buoyed by an unbeatable rags-to-riches narrative. A descendant of working-class Kentuckians, raised in small-town Ohio by a mother who struggled with opioid addiction, Vance joined the Marines out of high school, graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law, clerked for a federal judge, and spent a year at a white-shoe firm before making a fortune as a venture capitalist. He seemed, at least from a distance, like the model of a regular guy made good, proof that, with enough grit and determination, anyone can make it in America.

Up close, however, Vance no longer comes across quite so amiably. Instead of riding high on postconvention euphoria, Vance exited the Republican National Convention with the lowest favorability ratings of any nonincumbent VP candidate since 1980, and the days since then have been worse, as Vance’s support of extreme positions like a nationwide abortion ban, and his attacks on “childless cat ladies,” has come back into the spotlight. Rather than backing off those comments, Vance has opted to double down on the idea that adults without children have no stake in the future of the country, even adding Jennifer Aniston to his enemies list. The veteran political correspondent Charles Pierce suggested that Vance might actually be “the worst politician I’ve ever seen.”

Meanwhile, Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made Vance a national figure, has surged to the top of the bestseller lists, and its 2020 movie adaptation has racked up millions of views on Netflix, lodging in the streamer’s Top 10. This should have been good news for Vance, a chance for voters-slash-audiences to experience his life story in the way he wants it to be told. But the winds have shifted since 2016, when Vance’s memoir was held up as a key—even the key—to understanding the disaffection of the white working class that had swept Trump to his shocking victory. By the time the movie version reached theaters, eight days after Trump’s 2020 defeat, its portrait of down-at-heel Rust Belt life was derided as poverty porn, with the Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang calling it “an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.”

According to Vance’s best friend from Yale Law, movie critics’ savage response to Hillbilly Elegy was the “last straw,” the end of his attempts to win acceptance from the coastal elites who had once smirked at his choice of dinner fork. And, like Trump running for president to supposedly avenge his mockery at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the idea that it was mean-spirited liberals who turned Vance from a moderate Never Trumper into a full-throated MAGA warrior has a certain poetry to it—more so than the naked political calculation that is the likelier culprit. But in truth, those critics might have done Vance a favor by steering audiences away from a movie that paints him as an opportunist and the place he came from, and claims to represent, as a sinkhole that no self-respecting person would be caught dead in.

Directed by Ron Howard, who on The Andy Griffith Show made his name as an actor embodying an idealized version of small-town life, Hillbilly Elegy opens in full pastoral mode, with a young J.D. biking to the swimming hole as the sound of a keening fiddle mingles with his narration, describing his youthful summers in Kentucky as “hands down the best part of my childhood.” But no sooner has J.D. jumped into the water than a group of older local boys is holding him under, laughing as he struggles for air. This isn’t the Mayberry of Howard’s fictional childhood. It’s a brutal Darwinian landscape where people look out only for themselves.

Things are no better back in Middletown, Ohio, where Vance grew up and where the movie is mainly set. J.D.’s mother, Bev (Amy Adams), supports the family by working as a nurse, but she loses her job after stealing a patient’s painkillers, and even before then, she’s never far from a sudden downward spiral, at one point threatening to crash a car with both of them in it after J.D. sets off her temper. (It goes unstated that Bev may be using opioids to self-medicate for mental-health issues.) His grandmother, Mamaw (Glenn Close), tries to help out, but she has few resources and a hair-trigger temper of her own. She’s still married to Bev’s father, Papaw, but he lives in a separate house, and in a flashback, we see him beating her as a young Bev and her sister cower in the closet, until he drunkenly falls asleep and Mamaw sets his clothes on fire. In his RNC speech, Vance related a favorite anecdote about how, after she died, they found 19 loaded firearms stashed around her house so she would never be far from one.

Beyond the shots of a decayed industrial landscape, the movie of Hillbilly Elegy offers little sense of how this environment might appear to people other than the Vances, who are treated as special if only by dint of the movie’s sole focus on them. If a biopic has one job, it’s to present its protagonist as someone worthy of the treatment—a figure of historical significance, a person with an amazing story, or just someone whose life offers audience members insight into a world they might not have otherwise come into contact with. J.D.’s should be the latter, and that’s how Vance’s book is framed, intermingling memoir and regional sociology. But the movie’s Vances live in a vacuum, with little in the way of support from their community. When J.D. is living with his Mamaw, he watches through a crack in the door as she begs a man from Meals on Wheels for a second dinner, and although he has none to spare, he comes up with a little extra: a bunch of grapes, a small bag of potato chips. But the scene is presented as an illustration of her determination, not the man’s small act of kindness. They have no friends to share the burden, no church to help them out. It’s them against the world.

Instead, the movie presents J.D. as an exceptional, even singular case, the only person with the vision to see beyond his disadvantaged circumstances and the willpower to escape them. As Bev and Mamaw, Adams and Close treat their characters as grotesques, evoking pity but not empathy, as if we’re watching the story through the eyes of a teenage boy who still hasn’t wrapped his head around the idea that they’re adults with problems of their own. Close’s stooped posture and face-broadening prosthetics may make her look more like Vance’s real Mamaw, but they also underline the gulf between the character’s experience and her own. We never lose sight of the fact that we’re watching movie stars play dress-up, their characters designed for the sole purpose of justifying the protagonist’s determination to get the hell out.

Although Vance used his RNC acceptance speech to proclaim his determination to fight for people from “communities like mine,” Hillbilly Elegy is a story about how desperate he is to leave those people behind. In his final year as a law student, the older J.D., played by Gabriel Basso, is forced to rush home to Ohio after Bev overdoses on heroin, despite having a crucial job interview the following morning. He spends the day trying to find her a place in a rehab facility, maxing out his credit cards because Bev doesn’t have insurance, but when she refuses to check in, J.D. throws up his hands.* “I’ll do everything I can,” he says. “But I can’t stay.”

Vance has referred to Hillbilly Elegy as his “origin story,” a term that, as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear pointed out over the weekend, is deployed more frequently in reference to comic-book superheroes than by people recounting their childhoods. Like many of the politicians vying for the equivalent of Vance’s spot on the Democratic ticket, Beshear has spent the past week thumping Trump for his VP pick and presenting himself as the real version of what Vance pretends to be. “J.D. Vance ain’t from Kentucky. He ain’t from Appalachia,” Beshear said, while Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz quipped, “My hillbilly cousins did not go to Yale.” Vance, they argue, isn’t someone who fought for his community. He’s someone who left.

Vance would counter that he spent his brief career as a venture capitalist backing companies that created jobs in Appalachia, which is true, although he seems to have been far more successful at enriching himself than creating sustainable businesses. But either way, he’s doing it from afar. Even after he moved back to Ohio to run for office, Vance chose to surround himself with the people he purportedly despises, buying a $1.4 million home in a liberal neighborhood in Cincinnati. And if Hillbilly Elegy is for anyone, it’s for Vance’s current neighbors, not the people the story is about. It’s a vision of rural poverty crafted by and for coastal liberals, which must be why the rejection from critics stung especially hard, and why Vance has recently shown as much contempt for their life choices as for the people he grew up with.

For the millions watching Hillbilly Elegy for the first time, it’s becoming clear that J.D. Vance isn’t one of them and, in fact, never wanted to be. The more he tries to act like a regular guy, the less normal he seems (and that’s without even factoring in the couch business). “Where we come from is who we are,” J.D. says in the movie’s closing voice-over, “but we choose every day who we become.” In other words, what separates Vance from the people who still live in rural poverty isn’t opportunity or luck or governmental policy; it’s the choices they make. And if he got out, they have no excuse for not doing the same.