‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is confusing at times, lacks clarity

“Hillbilly Elegy,” Ron Howard’s mystifying film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir of escape from a hardscrabble childhood in Middletown, Ohio, features an early scene in rural Kentucky, where the character of J.D., in voiceover, tells us he was always happiest, and where his family’s Appalachian roots were. The protagonist, played in childhood by Owen Asztalos, finds a turtle with a cracked shell, fending off another boy who wants to kill the animal. It can heal itself, J.D. tells the kid.

That glaringly obvious metaphor of resilience and survival is the first and only instance of clarity in a story (adapted from Vance’s book by Vanessa Taylor) that is painted with a brush that seems both narrowly specific and overly broad. J.D.’S circumstances — an early life of emotional abuse by an addict mother (Amy Adams) and rescue in the form of education at Ohio State University and Yale Law School — are simultaneously held up as unique to him and, arguably, indicative of larger cultural traits.

From one side of its mouth, the film suggests that the values J.D. was imbued with — perseverance, self-sufficiency — fueled his success. (The author is a venture capitalist.) And yet those same values don’t seem to have saved many in his family — or, frankly, the larger Rust Belt community. From the other side of its mouth, the film hints that J.D. is who he is because he’s something of an anomaly: a chubby, ambitious, fact-spewing nerd who’d rather watch a news show on the Clinton-lewinsky scandal than sit through a cable broadcast of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” with his grandmother for the umpteenth time.

The story jumps back and forth, confusingly so at times, between the late 1990s and 2011, when the nowgrown J.D. (Gabriel Basso) is called back to Ohio from New Haven, Connecticut, where he lives with his gorgeous and sophisticated girlfriend (Freida Pinto) and is a highly sought-after law student, applying for summer internships with prestigious firms. His mother, it seems, has had a heroin overdose.

Lordy.

That O.D., however factual, is merely one of many melodramatic turns taken by this tale, which lurches from one calamity — about which no real conclusions can be drawn, let alone emotional resonance — to another. J.D.’S mother, Bev, whom Adams plays as a bloated, blearyeyed and blowzy hot mess, starts stealing pain pills at her hospital nursing job, leading to her firing. She threatens to crash a car, with J.D. in it, leading to her detainment by the police and catalyzing her son to run around with delinquents. She creates a scene in the middle of the street, and with blood dripping from her wrist.

“Hillbilly Elegy” eschews theories — more prominent in the book — that might help explain the opioid epidemic and the seemingly unbreakable cycle of poverty that defies simplistic solutions (yet might cause people to seek deliverance from a political outsider). The problem is that in doing so, the movie leaves us, like J.D.’S family, with only a mounting pile of baloney excuses for bad behavior.