‘American Factory’ Is the Perfect Chaser To Netflix’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy—the Ron Howard drama based on the 2016 memoir by J.D. Vance—may be exactly the kind of clichéd portrayal of the American working class that finally wins Glenn Close and Amy Adams the Oscars they’ve been chasing for years. But for those who want a little less melodrama and a little more empathy for the struggling rust belt, I recommend following Hillbilly Elegy with another Netflix movie: American Factory, last year’s Oscar-winning documentary.

Like Hillbilly Elegy, American Factory takes place in rural Ohio, where millions of Americans have been pushed into poverty thanks to the slow decline of the U.S. auto industry. But unlike Hillbilly Elegy—which embraces a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality that’s even more explicit in Vance’s book—American Factory offers a thoughtful, nuanced look at how global corporations have turned the American Dream into the American Impossibility.

Directed by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, this documentary follows the workers of a former GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, which was shut down in 2009 and then re-opened in 2016 as a glass factory after being purchased by a Chinese billionaire. The company, Fuyao Glass, hired back many of the local residents who’d been laid off after the shut-down and relocated many of its own employees working in China to the Dayton factory. But while those hired back were thrilled to be working again, they quickly realized their jobs weren’t what they used to be. Wages were lower. Hours were longer. Basic safety protocol was disregarded.

Tensions between the American and Chinese workers at the factory begin to rise, but Reichert and Bognar—both Dayton natives—smartly reframe the conflict not as employee in-fighting, but between the workers and the Fuyao management. Watch the film and you’ll see it’s not just the Chinese billionaires like chairman Cao Dewang who are looking to exploit the labor of workers. When a group of white, male American managers visits a Fuyao factory in China, several of them remark upon the fact that American workers are “lazy” compared to Chinese workers, who only get 1 or 2 days off a month, including weekends.

It’s the kind of line you might expect to find in J.D. Vance’s memoir, who credits his grandmother (“Mamaw,” played by Close) for putting him on the right path by yelling at him to “stop being a lazy piece of shit.” Hillbilly Elegy the movie takes that theme to heart with an age-old “hard work montage” that finds a young J.D. (played by Owen Asztalos) putting his head down and getting good grades, eventually getting into Yale Law school and—though the movie glosses over this part—going on to become a wealthy venture capitalist and conservative commentator. Unfortunately, most Americans in the rust belt—including the employees of the Fuyao Glass Company—don’t get that happy ending.

Instead—as you see in American Factory—they sustain injuries at work. They take on second jobs to pay their rent. They are fired in retaliation for a unionization attempt. American Factory was chosen by Barack and Michelle Obama to be the very first movie release by their new production company, Higher Ground, and, after you watch it, you can understand why. American Factory is the grim outlook on the working-class population that Hillbilly Elegy attempts to gloss over with “inspiration:” Poor people are trying, every day, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But corporations just keep pushing them back down.

Watch American Factory on Netflix