Review of Hillybilly Elegy

A film in which a poor boy from the Hill Country of Kentucky triumphs over adversity through grit and character. It's about the poverty that rural white people face, though it's rather prettied up - the boy's mother is a drug addict who abuses prescription drugs and shoots up, but she still looks OK; she has all of her own teeth, her skin is Hollywood-grade, and so on. 

It's apparently true story, based on an autobiographical book, so it can't be dismissed as unrealistic...but it must surely be unrepresentative. It's kind of flattering and reassuring about American society; the boy joins the Marine Corps, serves in Iraq - but we don't see any of that, just the bit where he joins up and has his hair cut, and then he's out and at Yale Law School.

BTW the boy as a grown-up at Yale has a brown girlfriend (he's not a racist or any sort of bad...there are hardly any Black people in the film, apart from a few shoppers and some nurses in a hospital scene or two) but she's Indian, from India. Are Indians the right sort of brown people for liberal and not-so-liberal Americans? No legacy of race relations, they're not even Muslims...?

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.