If Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy were a free-floating sphere of a movie—and not based on a now somewhat infamous memoir—you might be able to cut it some slack. The film, adapted from J.D. Vance’s 2016 book, details one man’s bumpy road from headed-for-trouble rust belt Ohio kid to promising Yale law student; he achieved this goal partly because he made the wrenching decision to separate himself from his mentally imbalanced, drug-addicted mother and succumb to the care of his Kentucky-born, tough-love-dispensing maternal grandmother, whom he called Mamaw.