Bless his heart for trying, but Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy is blatant awards-bait drenched in a mess of a melodrama. This is a film that tries to check all the “Oscar boxes” with its true-to-life/overcoming the odds tale, but fails (rather badly) in its execution. For starters, it’s a narrative mess – jumping all over the place with flashbacks galore, the movie never once finds its groove. What we get is one disjointed (not to mention cliched) scene after another. And just when a particular sequence hits the right emotional notes, we quickly switch to another where it most certainly does not. The movie’s saving grace is Glenn Close and Amy Adams, however. The veteran actresses go all in with some A-grade performances, with Close in particular delivering a depiction for the ages (just wait until you compare it with the real-life footage of “Mamaw” in the end credits!!). But alas, their wonderful acting work is all but wasted in the train wreck that is the rest of the film. There is certainly a great story at hand here, but it’s probably best you get it from J.D’s memoir and not this movie.