• Brian Douglas/Netflix
• Emily Blunt plays a pharma rep who builds her gain on other people's pain in a dark comedy that hedges too many bets.

In 2018, Evan Hughes' New York Times Magazine story "The Pain Hustlers" profiled the meteoric rise and fall of a pharmaceutical startup called Insys. Just a few years after its initial public offering made the company a "Wall Street darling," the chief executives faced federal racketeering charges for giving kickbacks to doctors who prescribed their fentanyl-based painkiller. Many of those physicians prescribed the drug off-label, with the company's assistance in dodging regulators and insurers. Patients and even clinic staff became addicted.

The article became a book, and Insys filed for bankruptcy. Now Netflix has adapted Hughes' cautionary tale of salesmanship and greed into Pain Hustlers, a fictionalized version of the story with the names changed and David Yates (the Fantastic Beasts movies) directing.

The deal

Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) knows her life is a mess. She dances at a strip club, lives in her sister's garage and is struggling to retain custody of her teen daughter (Chloe Coleman).

One day at the club, she bonds with Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a smooth-talking pharmaceutical salesman. Liza persuades Pete to give her an interview at his company, Zanna, which is trying in vain to market Lonafen, a new pain reliever for cancer patients. Pete adds some degrees to Liza's résumé, scrawls "PHD" on it and hires her. Then he confides that the abbreviation actually stands for "poor, hungry and dumb" — or, in her case, "desperate."

Liza isn't insulted. A born saleswoman, she figures out how to cozy up to doctors and convince them to switch their patients to Lonafen, which she believes is 100 percent safe. Pete concocts a scheme to sweeten the pot: a "speaker program" for which physicians are paid handsomely. Sales of Lonafen soar, and soon Liza is living the high life — as is her party girl mom (Catherine O'Hara), whom she has persuaded Pete to hire. The only problem: Patients on Lonafen keep overdosing.

Will you like it?

The Big Short deserved the praise it received for its precariously balanced combination of education and entertainment, irreverence and gravity. Over the years since its release, however, Adam McKay's film about the subprime mortgage crisis has become the template for ripped-from-the-headlines movies. And few of them come even close to pulling it off.

To that template, Pain Hustlers director Yates and screenwriter Wells Tower add elements of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas: Tracking shots, glitz, glitter and fist-pumping montages illustrate Liza's rise to the top of what is essentially a white-collar criminal organization. The filmmakers complicate things further by stuffing the story into the framework of a faux documentary. Every now and then, Liza and Pete are shown being interviewed by an unseen filmmaker, a conceit that never pays off.

The story of Insys/Zanna is inherently compelling, and Pain Hustlers is an effective crash course in the tactics that pharma companies have employed to bend and break the law. We watch Liza use her attractiveness and charm to play on lonely doctors' vanity. We marvel at how easily some of them toss aside their Hippocratic oath. We laugh at the quirks of Zanna's deranged founder (Andy Garcia), who tells investors a sob story about losing his wife to cancer even as he pushes doctors to prescribe his dangerously powerful drug to all comers.

None of this colorful misbehavior makes much of an impact, however, because the composite characters at the story's core just aren't that interesting. Only Liza, our protagonist, has anything resembling depth, and the screenplay pulls a bait-and-switch with her.

When we meet Liza, hustling customers at the strip joint, she's the slithering, scruple-free embodiment of ambition — no one we would ever root for, but fun to watch. As she rises in the world and becomes a "girl boss" on the backs of suffering patients, however, the filmmakers try to redeem her by giving her a more sympathetic motivation. It feels like a late-in-the-game attempt to pretty up the character and make her worthy of Blunt's star power.

This plot arc reaches its nadir when we learn that a seemingly pointless minor character exists solely to make Liza misty-eyed and remorseful. But the movie's efforts to paint her as a heroic whistleblower fall flat, because it's tough to take seriously her wide-eyed insistence that she didn't know fentanyl could hurt anybody.

Hughes' story may not feature a gutsy single mom or a buffoonish CEO, but it leaves readers with a chilling sense of the perils of making health care a for-profit enterprise. The movie, by contrast, hustles and bustles but doesn't really sell us on anything.

If you like this, try...

"Painkiller" (six episodes, 2023; Netflix): In Pain Hustlers, Zanna executives paint themselves as the underdogs to avoid association with notorious giants such as Purdue Pharma. Netflix covered that side in this drama series based on nonfiction accounts of the Sackler family's role in the opioid epidemic.

"The Dropout" (eight episodes, 2022; Hulu): Like Liza in Pain Hustlers, real-life medical fraudster Elizabeth Holmes worked the "girl boss" angle. This drama series explores how she shaped her winning image and used it to sell America on a nonexistent tech marvel.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022; Max, rentable): Movies about pharmaceutical malfeasance generally make some effort to give the victims their due. But they can't approach the raw grief embodied in Laura Poitras' documentary about artist Nan Goldin and her personally driven quest to get art institutions to sever their profitable connections with the Sackler family.