That's the weird thing about the movie, it never shows you how Vance got from Point A to Point B. Supposedly the book has some kind of "message" about "picking yourself up by your bootstraps", but this "message" is totally absent from the movie. It's just random scenes of teenage hillbilly Vance with his wacked out family intercut with random scenes of young adult Harvard-educated lawyer Vance in "present day"
Whoever edited the film together seems to have been on the drugs that Vance's hillbilly Mama Amy Adams was on throughout the movie.
I haven’t seen it but what you say echoes reviews I read. They say Amy Adams overacted.
The A to B was....he joined the Marines and with the GI bill he could afford college.