In David Yates’s film, Emily Blunt plays a single mother who takes a job at a pharmaceutical start-up with questionable sales methods.
“Pain Hustlers,” a conflicted yet entertaining dramedy from David Yates, takes its title from a group of pitchmen hawking fentanyl to clinics across the southeast. The drug is legal. Their sales methods aren’t — but in the mockumentary footage that opens the film, they try to sell the audience on their innocence. One pusher (Catherine O’Hara) huffs defensively that she’s not “El Chapo or something.”
The script, by Wells Tower, is about a fictive drug named Lonafen. It’s inspired by the journalist Evan Hughes’s coverage of Insys Therapeutics, whose founder, John Kapoor, was convicted and served two years in prison. Like so many other recent movies on brands from Blackberry to Beanie Babies, it’s about how low people will sink to make a buck while justifying their misdeeds as the cost of successful capitalism. Turns out the price of a soul is pretty cheap.
Our way into the story is Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a single mother who once peddled lipstick, steak knives, and pig dung, and is scraping by as a stripper when a skeevy patron, Pete (Chris Evans), enlists her into pharmaceutical sales. Her new boss, a widower named Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia), invented a fast-acting fentanyl spray for cancer patients like his late wife. Within months, Liza propels Lonafen’s market penetration from zero to 86 percent.
Liza is an enthralling huckster. In one great bit, she fast-talks a principal out of expelling her daughter (a promising Chloe Coleman) for nearly burning down the school. She’s also an amalgamation of several real people from Hughes’s book, “The Hard Sell,” which makes the character feel overstuffed with multiple personalities that flip-flop between greed and guilt. Both Blunt and the woman she’s playing come off as hard-working charmers, but it’s impossible to buy that Liza is at once Lonafen’s savviest employee and the only naïf who believes the drug is, as she insists, “safer than aspirin.”
It’s not, of course. Beanie Babies fanatics lost fortunes; Lonafen users are losing their lives. The movie is constrained by its own conscience, thriving when Evans’s marvelously feral Pete is unleashed to dress like a Lonafen spray and rap about sales commissions, only to pivot apologetically from corporate bacchanals to suffering victims. There’s a wonderful, hallucinatory shot of a hooked veteran (Willie Raysor) gazing across a car lot at an inflatable sky dancer whose sagging limbs are slowed down to become an interpretive dance of addiction. Other junkies are merely sketches of mass misery, such as the anonymous horde of extras instructed to stumble toward Liza like zombies.
The scariest characters, however, are the doctors. The strip mall lonely-heart Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) writes narcotic prescriptions in exchange for fancy macarons, phony flattery from women, and cash costumed as speaking engagement fees. (One savagely funny young drug hustler played by Colby Burton even traffics in sexual favors.) Here, only the fictional Liza frets over the patients while the increasingly money-mad Dr. Neel vows to push Lonafen onto people without cancer. “Grow or die!” he orders his sales team — the language of a tumor.
Pain Hustlers
Rated R for language, nudity and drug use (legal and illegal). Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
