Pain Hustlers
Pain Hustlers is a 2023 American crime drama film directed by David Yates from a screenplay by Wells Tower. It is based on the 2022 book of the same name by Evan Hughes. The film stars Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O'Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d'Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman. Its plot centers on a high school dropout who lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical company in Central Florida, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy. Pain Hustlers had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2023, and was released in select theaters in the United States on October 20, 2023, before its streaming debut by Netflix on October 27, 2023. Plot
Liza Drake is a struggling single mother working as an exotic dancer in Florida while raising her teenage daughter Phoebe and dealing with Phoebe's father who lives in Savannah. After meeting Pete Brenner at her club and having a friendly and casual conversation, he offers her a job paying $100,000 per year. Later, Liza is called into her daughter's school when her daughter and her friends are suspended for starting a fire near the campus. Liza takes Phoebe and her niece home, where she's living out of her sister's garage. After an argument about money her sister kicks her out and Liza and Phoebe move into a motel. After her car is towed from the motel, Liza tracks down Pete to his office to take him up on his job offer. Unbeknownst to her, the pharmaceutical company he works for, Zanna, is failing and they're desperately attempting to sell the company before they reach bankruptcy. Pete looks at Liza's resume and forges a more impressive curricula vitae, claiming she has a bachelor's degree in biochemistry. He then takes her to meet the founder of the company, Doctor Jack Neel, who hires her immediately despite the company being on an apparent hiring freeze. Pete gives her a five-day probation to convince a major physician to prescribe their marquee drug, Lonafen. Liza goes through the entire list of potential clients in fewer than five days and fails to secure any prescriptions. Meanwhile, Phoebe experiences a seizure and they learn she has CAVM. Thinking the job opportunity is over, she returns to the office of Dr. Lydell, her first sales attempt to collect a piece of Tupperware she left with him and overhears a cancer patient and his wife discussing the poor side effects he's experiencing from a more commonly prescribed drug. After making a convincing and transparent case that Lonafen would be a better option for his patient, Lydell agrees to prescribe it. Liza also invites him to help launch their speaker program wherein he can share his testimony about the drug's efficacy as a physician. The event initially fails and Lydell nearly ends his relationship with Zanna despite his patient praising the drug, but Liza is able to salvage the situation and turn it into a proper speakers program. When Pete offers Lydell financial incentives to prescribe Lonafen, Lydell officially signs on. A few days later Pete shows Liza that Lydell has been prescribing Lonafen as often as he can. After her success with Lydell, a flood of new recruits arrive hoping to join Zanna as sales reps. After sending the team out into the field, Zanna rises to take 86% of the market share in the northeast. Larkin tries to expose Liza as a fraud for her resume that Pete doctored. This backfires and angers Neel who promotes Liza to National Sales Director and Pete to COO, the latter of whom immediately fires Larkin. As Zanna continues to rake in profits, they move into a larger headquarters and Neel's eccentricities begin to manifest more clearly. During an executive meeting CEO Eric Paley makes suspicious comments, provoking Pete to aggressively frisk him where he finds his smartphone is recording the meeting. Paley claims he's just recording it as an insurance policy in case the company runs into legal trouble. Paley is fired, but cashes in on his company shares and earns millions. Neel grows angry and impatient when sales begin to flatten out, and pressures Liza and the sales team to push the drug off-label, marketing it for all types of pain, not just cancer. He also instructs Liza to fire her mother Jackie, after he slept with her following a speaker program, whom Liza hired as a representative with the initial group. Liza approaches Lydell with her new marching orders and is disappointed when he readily agrees to prescribe Lonafen off-label. Meanwhile, Phoebe experiences another seizure during a school rehearsal, and the doctor tells her the arterial mass in Phoebe's brain has grown and she needs to have the surgery to have it removed. Liza attempts to offer her stock options in Zanna as collateral for a loan that will pay for Phoebe's surgery but the bank denies her because of the volatility in the pharmaceutical industry. After Lydell is arrested in a DEA sting operation, Liza believes Zanna is finished as a company, and in desperation approaches Neel for financial help paying for the surgery. Neel instead exhorts her to use the crisis of Phoebe's situation as "fire" for inspiration, like he did when his wife was dying from cancer and he came up with Lonafen. After her friend Camille's husband Sidney dies from an overdose on Lonafen and Camille coldly rejects Liza's condolences, Liza decides to testify to the U.S. Attorney's office that's investigating Zanna. She admits that she helped build Zanna's speaker program and worked to bring their bribery program into compliance. When asked who else signed off on those programs she confirms the names given to her: Eric Paley, Pete Brenner, and Jack Neel. She's told testimony won't be enough and they ask for greater proof linking Neel to the criminal activity, which Liza explains is nearly impossible because Neel has insulated himself from the daily operations. At the next speaker program Liza attempts to steal a printout from Pete's jacket but he catches her in the parking lot before she can leave and finds the printout in her purse. Pete is implicated and arrested, though Neel offers to take care of his family and assets while he's in prison. The FBI also catch up to Eric Paley and arrest him. While all of his executives were being arrested, Neel remained untouchable, even appearing on magazine covers. Liza recalls her mom's earlier affair with Neel and asks how she corresponded with him. Jackie says he didn't give out his phone but gave her his email which she used to make her request for a commission increase that Neel wanted her fired for. Liza finds that Jackie had saved the emails and they served as the link between Neel and the illegal activities at Zanna. In the U.S. Attorney's depositions, experts reveal that Lonafen is just fentanyl which is why non-terminal patients who were prescribed the drug became addicted and often died from overdose. Lydell, Paley, Brenner, and Neel all received fines and prison sentences. After a heartfelt apology given in court, and the U.S. Attorney's recommendation that Liza not serve a prison sentence in order not to discourage future whistleblowers, the judge still sentences Liza to 16 months in prison, stating that her greed cost lives. 15 months later Liza has been released early and has partnered with her mother and some of the original sales representatives from Zanna to form the cosmetics company that she and Jackie had envisioned when Liza was still living in her sister's garage. Liza considers that she almost never thinks about her former career with Zanna, except when she can't sleep. She'll dream about running Zanna as the CEO and saving it from the corruption that became its downfall, but she quickly abandons those thoughts because they scare her. Cast

Production
In August 2021, Sony Pictures announced the development of an untitled film directed by David Yates and written by Wells Tower, based on the Evan Hughes’ New York Times Magazine article, “The Pain Hustlers” from May 2, 2018  and his subsequent book The Hard Sell released in January 2022. It is a co-production between Grey Matter Productions and Wychwood Pictures. Yates produced the film along with Lawrence Grey and Yvonne Walcott Yates. In May 2022, Emily Blunt joined the cast and Netflix acquired the film, which was titled Pain Hustlers, in a deal worth at least $50 million. In July, Chris Evans came on board to star. In August, Andy Garcia, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d'Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman were added to the cast. Production began in late August. Release
Pain Hustlers had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2023. It was released in select theaters in the United States on October 20, 2023. It was released by Netflix on October 27, 2023. Reception

See also
Insys Therapeutics

References

External links
 
 

American crime drama films
English-language Netflix original films
Films about businesspeople
Films based on non-fiction books
Films directed by David Yates
Films scored by James Newton Howard