Jennifer Lawrence (and supporting actor Bradley Cooper) makes this film better than it deserves to be.  I found the first quarter of the film to drag, but what put it in gear were the scenes with Lawrence and Cooper who together raised the bar for this (inspired by a true) story of a working class woman, once full of dreams and promise but kept back by what life has thrown her way, battling back, against the odds, to create a business empire.  The scenes with four generations of her family are too crazy to be believable (but Robert De Niro,  Dianne Ladd and Virginia Madsen, to name a few, seem to be having a ball), but enjoyable.  

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