Pain Hustlers, about a down-and-out woman who gets on board with selling a fentanyl-like drug, premieres on Netflix October 27. Emily Blunt portrays Liza, a working-class single mother who has lost her job and does not have many options, and so enlists in a pharmaceutical racketeering scheme operating out of a strip mall in Florida.
The pharmaceutical operation is behind a fictional drug called Lonafen.
Chris Evans plays the sleazy guy who brings Liza into the pharma scheme. Andy Garcia plays her unhinged boss.
Chloe Coleman, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass and Brian D’arcy James are also in the cast.
David Yates is the director. Wells Tower wrote the screenplay, inspired by a 2018 New York Times Magazine story by Evan Hughes called The Pain Hustlers. Hughes also authored the book The Hard Sell, which was retitled Pain Hustlers.
Netflix calls the film “a sharp and revealing look at what some people do out of desperation and others do out of greed.” The trailer is here.
Pain Hustlers began a limited theatrical release October 20. The film is rated R.
Blunt’s film credits include A Quiet Place, The Girl on the Train and Oppenheimer.
Evans has been in Fantastic Four, Avengers: Endgame and Knives Out.
The New York Times calls Pain Hustlers “a conflicted yet entertaining dramedy.”
The review says, “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.’”
Rolling Stone said Pain Hustlers “lets Emily blunt tear Big Pharma a new one.”
