‘Pain Hustlers’ strains moving from breezy satire to heavy drama

Please bear with me here because this is a bit of a winding road. The Netflix comedy/drama “Pain Hustlers” is a fictionalized and highly stylized adaptation of Evan Hughes’ 2022 book “The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup,” based in part on a 2018 article Hughes wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which chronicled the crash-and-burn story of Insys Therapeutics, the pharma company that went to extreme and criminal lengths to market and sell Subsys, a fentanyl-based liquid spray.

Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, “Pain Hustlers” aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.

Further muddying the waters: While some of the main characters are loosely inspired by real-life figures, they’re totally fictional — as is the company and the so-called wonder drug being sold. Coming late to the game, as we’ve already had the Hulu mini-series “Dopesick” and the Netflix limited series “Painkiller” and the documentary film about the Sackler family titled “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” — even the recent Netflix series “The Fall of the House of Usher” took on a fictional big pharma family — this is a well-acted and initially gripping story that loses momentum about halfway through and undergoes severe and often implausible shifts in tone.

The best thing about this film: the performances from the star-studded cast. Emily Blunt impressively slips into character as one Liza Drake, a Florida-based single mother with a precocious adolescent daughter named Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) and a horrible (offscreen) ex-husband. Living in her sister’s garage, Liza is struggling to make ends meet as a dancer in a depressing, third-rate strip club when she meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a skeezy sales executive with a pharmaceutical startup called Zanna.

Pete drunkenly offers Liza a job and, after he fudges her resume in a big way, Liza is hired at the flailing company. Its CEO, the mercurial billionaire Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia), has paid for a study that supposedly says the painkilling spray Lonafen works much faster than other opioids and poses less than a 1% risk of addiction. (Let’s just say the company cherry-picked the results of that study.)

Cue the montages of Liza and Pete wooing ethically dubious doctors by recruiting them for a “speaker’s program” that is essentially a glorified form of kickbacks. (Liza has concerns about their methods, but Pete likens it to driving 67 mph in a 65 mph zone. Everybody does it!) After Liza successfully woos a caricature of a slimy, strip-mall, pill-mill doctor (Brian d’Arcy James), the floodgates are open, with Liza raking in big bucks in commissions, recruiting a team of attractive albeit highly unqualified salespeople and eventually convincing doctors to write scripts for off-label uses. Initially marketed as a pain-relieving drug for cancer patients, Lonafen is now being prescribed for everything from post-surgery pain to mere headaches. Oh, and it’s also incredibly addictive and can turn you into a zombie with teeth falling out of your mouth. What could possibly go right?

Director Yates regularly employs the device of a documentary-within-the movie, with Liza and Jack and other major characters giving interviews to an unseen questioner. Those scenes are shot in a silvery black-and-white style that looks nothing like an actual documentary and add little context to the story. Screenwriter Wells Tower goes to great lengths to make Liza a sympathetic character; her daughter requires an expensive form of brain surgery not covered by insurance, meaning Liza has to raise nearly a half-million dollars on her own, so we can understand why Liza doesn’t ask too many questions about the horrific human damage caused by the product she’s peddling. When Liza DOES start to ask questions, she instantly shifts into heroic whistleblower mode, overnight. By this point, the stylish scenes of Liza and Pete and Jack taking over the Florida market for painkillers and reaping the rewards have given way to sobering vignettes of victims succumbing to addiction while the feds close in on all the main players at Zanna.

In a Time magazine article by Esther Zuckerman about “Pain Hustlers,” we’re told, “Yates said the trick was to have fun with the material, while still respecting the people who lost their lives because of Subsys and the opioid crisis at large.” That’s one tough trick, and they fall short of pulling it off.