Is this really America?

Take it from someone who grew up in a county seat small town in Kansas: Almost everything about this film is really how it is on the Great Plains.

In the 60s and 70s, county seats across Kansas and Nebraska might have had as many as 5,000 people, with a sustainable model from all the farmers and their 1,000-acre setups. These individual family farms created enough population so that the towns were market centers - small ones, to be sure, but dynamic and even growing in some cases.

Technology and mass farming has almost eliminated that small of a farmstead. Today it's not uncommon for "farms" to be 50,000 acres or more, all agri-business these days. With technology and efficiencies, counties were drained of the farmers and families that supported the small towns and county seats. Not to mention, kids growing up in such small towns do their best to flee to the cities as soon as they're able.

The result is a plethora of these small towns across the Plains, once with individual populations of 4,000 or 5,000, now with perhaps 1,500 living there, median age north of 40 or even higher.

Lately some of these towns, especially in SD and ND, have re-populated thanks to the fracking bubble. That likely won't last.

In my hometown, there are exactly two national chain restaurants: A Subway and a Pizza Hut. I personally didn't set foot in a McDonald's until I was 16 and on a trip to Topeka.

When I was in high school we had 400 in the four grades and my graduating class had 84 people in it. Today, that same building houses fewer than 200 students.

I understand the US is still coming out of a recession and times are still tough but the film felt like it could've been set in 1989 with minimal differences.

I grew up in rural Illinois, and I can tell you...yeah. That's the way it is. Depressing as sh!t. I had to get out, which is why I now live in Chicago. Going back home is like stepping into a time portal...night and day, I tell ya.

More or less, yes. I live in the Midwest, there are many small towns similar to those displayed in the movie. It's not dreary, btw, small towns are more or less like that globally, just saying.

América is not US! América is not a country, is a continent !!

Much of the rural West/Midwest still looks like this. The shots reminded me of my hometown in an Illinois farming community. I wouldn't necessarily characterize them as poor. Most of these people are large land owners with 100 or more acres. The people and setting are about as American as apple pie.

There are thousands, perhaps millions, of small towns littered all over the U.S. like Hawthorne, Nebraska. I'm from one of them. And besides differences in terrain and backdrops (mountains and hills vs. flat country), these towns are all remarkably the same, and they hardly ever change. The town of my birth, Clearfield, PA, today looks just like it did 30-40 years ago.

So outside of the big cities, yes, this is exactly what small town USA is like.

HARUMPH!

I find it weird people are surprised about about the "poverty" depicted in this film. Everybody had large houses filled with all kinds of crap; china cabinets, hard wood furniture, etc. I mean, they're not exactly living in tin shacks and *beep* in the river. Maybe it's just because I grew up in a small town. It all seems normal to me (though the film stylized in a certain way, obviously).

But yeah, I think this film depicts the elderly social life in small towns fairly realistically.

If you want to see poverty in the U.S. go to the inner cities, appalachia, etc.