Why Did Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy”, Based on Memoir by Trump's VP Pick J.D. Vance, Divide Critics?

Donald Trump selected Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to be his 2024 running mate

Hillbilly Elegy, the movie adaptation of J.D. Vance's memoir, wasn't a critical darling at the time of its release.

Ron Howard directed the 2020 Netflix drama, which was based on the 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by Vance — who on July 15 was revealed to be Donald Trump's running mate for the 2024 presidential election.

Despite the film earning Oscar nominations — Best Supporting Actress for Close and Best Makeup and Hairstyling — it landed a rotten score of 25 percent on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

Gabriel Basso starred as adult Vance, who turns 40 in August, in the movie, alongside Amy Adams as his mother Bev, Glenn Close as his grandmother Mamaw, Haley Bennett as his sister Lindsay, and Freida Pinto as his wife Usha. Owen Asztalos played a young Vance.

Related: Donald Trump Names J.D. Vance as His 2024 Running Mate: What to Know About the Freshman Ohio Senator

Vance was an executive producer on Hillbilly Elegy, which told the story of his upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, and how he went on to become a Yale Law School grad.

Critics were divided on the movie when it came out in November 2020, with David Sims writing in a review for The Atlantic that it was "one of the worst movies of the year." At the time, the A.V. Club's Katie Rife called it "bootstrapping poverty porn" that "reinforces the stereotypes it insists it’s illuminating."

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Scott Mendelson, for Forbes, wrote that the film "plays like 'privileged' Hollywood outsiders looking in with pity so as to assuage their white liberal guilt. By ignoring the very specific politics and personal observations that made the book allegedly valuable as a memoir, the film negates its very reason for existing."

After the movie came out, Vance became a Republican senator for Ohio. Though he had once called Trump, 78, an "idiot" and "reprehensible," he later showed support for the former president — now his running mate for November 2024.

Back in 2022, Hillbilly Elegy director Howard, 70, told Variety he was "surprised" by Vance's political ambitions and apparent 180 when it came to Trump.

"When I was getting to know J.D.," said Howard, "we didn’t talk politics because I wasn’t interested in that about his life. I was interested in his childhood and navigating the particulars of his family and his culture, so that’s what we focused on in our conversation."

Howard said in his talks with Vance, Vance told him he "didn’t care for Trump." Recalled the director, “He didn’t like him at all.... I haven’t talk to him in a couple of years." Additionally, Vance "wasn’t interested in running for office," at the time, "but I think his interest was renewed," said Howard.

“At the time I was working with him he was concentrating on starting his family and he was becoming a businessman and I asked him about it," said Howard. "He said, ‘Maybe someday down the road.’ Someday came a little sooner than any of us expected."

In 2020, Vance said in an interview that he at first "didn’t want to actually make a movie out of the book" because he "worried" about losing "creative control" on the story. "But," he said, "I really liked Ron, and I think he is a good person — though, of course, we don’t share the same politics."

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