Watched it last night. Interesting, but depressing. After showing a horrendous childhood, it fails to show him succeeding as an adult. A lot of profanity.
I recall reading the book jacket, which is where the author's bio is usually found, and being astounded at how far he had come—as of then.
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.