My husband sold this movie to me as explaining America, because he knows I am a sucker for anything that aims at this noble purpose. Then he revised his assessment and suggested it predicts Trump because it depicts the simmering class war between college-educated elites and blue-collar workers. For my part, I found it extremely charming and funny and totally implausible, though after further research, some of what I thought was preposterous turned out to be true. But I thought it argued the opposite of the class war thesis.
First, I was just amazed by the depiction of Indiana University as basically the height of elitism and prestige. And not just IU, but the Greek life of IU in particular. They are portrayed like stereotypical East Coast elites - sophisticated, worldly, and enormously wealthy. I am from Illinois, and many of my classmates attended IU. They were, needless to say, not quite the cream of the crop - socioeconomically or academically. It's true that they were somewhat richer than my high school's average, but only because, coming from Illinois, they had to pay out of state tuition, a requirement inapplicable to the majority of IU students. Beyond that, they were amiable and moderately literate party people, utterly unintimidating and unpretentious. It is very hard to imagine how any working-class kid like the characters in the movie would diminished around them. IU is a fine institution, but it's a big, Midwestern flagship; it was conceived as the inverse of the snooty established colleges of the East. Maybe the 1970s were a foreign country.
Second, it is equally hard to believe that a big Midwestern state school like IU would be so invested in the effete sport of cycling as to hold an annual university-wide bicycle race that is as popular as March Madness. But on this point, my skepticism was evidently misplaced, because the Little 500 is a real thing and people do get really into it.
Third, isn't it a violation of the canons of twentieth-century American film that a character like Mike, an attractive former high school quarterback with multitudinous muscles protruding from his mostly-shirtless torso, would be a social outcast whose only friends are a ragtag group of weirdos? His place in the movie as the primary exponent of class-based ressentiment against the beautiful people (of, once again, Indiana University!) is totally inscrutable to me. Why isn't he a Popular Person?
Fourth, the main character's mother seems way too old to be having another kid before the age of reproductive technology, and possibly even in that age. But ok, we'll let that slide as a piece of movie universe magic.
What does this movie tell us about America? It seemed to me to point in the opposite direction of the caricature of the Trump-voting working class white anti-elitist. The problem for the Cutters wasn't that they were being shut out of upward mobility (symbolized here by "going to college") by the malevolence of an established ruling class, but that they were mostly refusing to join it because of irrational prejudices of their own. They could go to college, but they didn't want to. The main character's father (clearly the best character in the movie) stands for those prejudices - the "I didn't need college so why should anyone else" ethic. By the end, he comes around to the idea that sending his son to the college whose buildings he helped to build would be a kind of poetic fulfillment rather than a betrayal of his values. There is a populist element: the loss of stone-cutting jobs in the quarries closed off the opportunities that the sons of the stone-cutters grew up expecting. But it's also clear that new opportunities are available if they could just let go of their class prejudices. That's the key difference, I think. It's not the class prejudices of the college-educated that come in for criticism in this movie so much as those of the non-college-educated. So college is the solution, not the problem. The 1970s were a foreign country.