Roxanne Kelly

Watch JD's sister in this movie carefully. Lindsay stays in Middletown. She gets married and has kids and works a normal job. Her story is what "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" really looks like. Her normal life is what success looks like for poor people from a dysfunctional home. One of the best scenes in this movie sums up Lindsay in a nutshell. It shows her washing the plastic forks and knives after a party at her house. This small act sums up my blue-collar roots more than anything else in this movie. My family got by through a thousand small acts exactly like that one. For all the people out there so broke that you can only put $5 into your gas tank because that's all you have, you'll get it. You'll get this movie. And you'll get Lindsay. It's harder to stay behind and deal with the day to day struggles in a place like that than it is to rise up and leave like JD. If you want to understand blue-collar struggle, watch Lindsey. She had the same addicted mother as JD, but she managed to carve out a normal life for herself. That life is precarious, she's financially vulnerable, but she's hanging on.