Hillbilly Elegy Trailer Touts a Transformed Amy Adams in the Ron Howard Netflix Movie

Hillbilly Elegy, director Ron Howard’s Netflix-bound next film, makes its Oscar aspirations quite clear upon the release of its first trailer. Indeed, we can already see how an impressive cast complements the clear head-turning moments of Amy Adams transformed before our very eyes as an addiction-addled mother amidst an unstable family dynamic.

Howard, the ever-reliable cinematic craftsman and Oscar-winning director of A Beautiful Mind, stepped behind the camera for this movie adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” a 2016 #1 New York Times Bestseller memoir by J.D. Vance, adapted as a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor (Game of Thrones, The Shape of Water).

The drama is high and the prospective Oscar clips are rife in Netflix‘s Hillbilly Elegy trailer, which you can check out just below.

As Netflix’s official synopsis for Hillbilly Elegy reads:

“J.D. Vance (Gabriel Basso), a former Marine from southern Ohio and current Yale Law student, is on the verge of landing his dream job when a family crisis forces him to return to the home he’s tried to forget. J.D. must navigate the complex dynamics of his Appalachian family, including his volatile relationship with his mother Bev (Amy Adams), who’s struggling with addiction. Fueled by memories of his grandmother Mamaw (Glenn Close), the resilient and whip-smart woman who raised him, J.D. comes to embrace his family’s indelible imprint on his own personal journey.”

Amy Adams makes her first onscreen appearance here since 2018, in which she appeared in director Adam McKay’s biographical political drama, Vice, and fielded a starring run on HBO’s Sharp Objects. Her immediate backlog includes a starring role in director Joe Wright’s currently-unscheduled drama, The Woman in the Window, and her performance as Lois Lane in 2017’s Justice League will be revived and refurbished as a miniseries for HBO Max’s upcoming release of director Zack Snyder’s original vision of the film. However, Hillbilly Elegy might just become a seven-times-a-charm moment for the six-time Oscar nominee.

Speaking of several-times-Oscar-nominated actresses who never nabbed the statue, Glenn Close co-stars here as Mawmaw, the elderly, Terminator movie-loving mother of Adams’s Bev, seemingly bringing a latter-day Cloris Leachman-like vibe. The cast also consists of Frieda Pinto, Haley Bennett, Bo Hopkins, with Gabriel Basso playing the key role here as the adult version of author J.D. Vance, who would eventually escape the economic anemia and opioid-addled struggles of Appalachian life to become a U.S. Marine, a Yale Law student and, eventually, a successful venture capitalist.

Hillbilly Elegy Release Date

Hillbilly Elegy arrives on Netflix on Tuesday, November 24.