The ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Movie Is as Bad as Everyone Said It Was

American audiences are gluttons for punishment. That’s the only logical explanation for the repeated tendency to be warned, at great volume, that a piece of pop culture is abysmally terrible—and then flock to it anyway and make it bafflingly popular.

The latest example is the surge in popularity of the Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy, the 2020 cinematic abomination—er, excuse me… adaptation—of J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir.

Ron...