This is an extremely bad movie. It is misery porn disguised as Oscar bait.J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso) is a Yale Law School student looking for a placement with a prestigious law firm when he gets a call from his sister (Haley Bennett) saying their mom (Amy Adams) has OD'd on heroin. J.D. returns home to Ohio to try and get his mom care while remembering via flashbacks his tumultuous upbringing by the violent, unpredictable mom and the rough but caring Mamaw (Glenn Close).
I thought I had read somewhere that the author whose memoir this is based on admitted that it was fiction, but I can't find anything about that in any reputable site. I did find that the book was considered controversial because of the generalizations of people and situations in Appalachia that offended people who were actually from there and people who spent a career studying those people. The writer would not be the first mediocre white dude to take a personal situation and try to extrapolate it out to a greater population in an attempt to universalize the issue. But we're not here to talk about the memoir (because I didn't read it). We're here to talk about the movie.
It's still not good. Even if you take away the controversy, it's just not a very good movie. It's extremely heavy-handed while incorporating every cliché about addiction and poverty you've ever seen before. Its only two nominations are for "uglying" up Adams and Close, and Close's performance. Adams has already tried this back for The Fighter and it didn't work then. Glenn Close has been nominated for an Oscar eight times but I just don't see this being the one that wins. If she should have won, it would have been for Fatal Attraction, her breakout role, or Albert Nobbs, not without its own controversy because she played a trans man.
Just to clarify, she shouldn't get an Oscar for playing a trans man, she should have gotten it because the role was difficult and she played the character well.
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