Shortly after Donald Trump took office in 2016, budding conservative darling Jd Vance published "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis." A look at Vance's youth in Middletown, Ohio, the story was just the right kind of white poverty porn that Hollywood loves to scoop up and romanticize into Oscar bait — complete with a no-nonsense "Mamaw" who delivers hard truths as one-liners, a matriarch struggling with opioid addiction without access to a rehabilitation facility that resembles a resort spa, and an "inspiring" ending where someone from this family miraculously gets out and attends an Ivy League school. It also came at a time when the U.S., still shell-shocked from what was predicted to be a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, finally realized that the needs of rural, white, poor communities had been neglected.

Four years later, Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard adapted the book into the Netflix film "Hillbilly Elegy,...