“Pain Hustlers” is a “true story” inspired drama whose tone and story arc match that of the real “triumph of medicine” to “tragedy invented by Big Pharma” saga of opioids, the “pain” drug that many maintain “broke America.”

The film opens jaunty as it takes us to a strip club recruiting session where pharmaceutical hustler Pete (Chris Evans) recruits single-mom/failed pole dancer Liza (Emily Blunt) to push this new relief med meant for stage four cancer patients suffering “cancer breakthrough pain.” We get lessons in how pharmaceuticals are “pitched” to doctors, the not-so-secret gimmick of having ex beauty queens, working on commission, do the pitching and the pecking order of Big Pharma.

Purdue Pharma earns another much-deserved backhanded slap.

And then we’re taken inside Zanna, a sketchy Florida-based Little Pharma firm with a pain drug it wants to ride to riches, if only these plucky pill pirates can talk doctors into “writing our scripts.”

We meet that stripper, see her real-life struggles and get competing views on just how good or at least “effective” she was at her hustle as the movie sets up with an “interviews after the fact” framework that slips into voice-overs as Liza and Peter — with others pitching in — describe each other as the villains or bigger villains in an epidemic that we know, by the third act, will be killing people.

A money moment in this somewhat flat David Yates (he made the most boring of the “Harry Potter” pictures) saga comes when it’s all going wrong, Liza checks on a doctor only to arrive after he’s been arrested and his parking lot is full of desperate, addicted patients who close in around her Mercedes convertible like zombies in the comeuppance scenes in a horror flick.

This true story — transported from Arizona to Florida with the names changed to force us to look up the real criminals — keeps most of the victims faceless, and most of the corruption a slow drift from rust to outright rot as shortcuts are taken, doctors are won over with bribes and a lot of people get rich as the sick get addicted.

Liza and Peter give their big discoveries — “Doctors are just as greedy and horny as everybody else.” — via voice-over. But Evans’ patter never slacks off as Pete hard-sells Liza, instructs her that “Commissions get you into heaven” and even raps his enthusiasm for their relief-for-the-cancerous-and-possibly-dying drug at one point.

Evans’ upbeat and hyper Amoral Pete is our Everyman, easily corrupted if the money’s right. Liza is meant to be the conscience of the piece and Blunt sells that “everybody’s got their reasons for cheating and preying on the vulnerable” sob story like a true believer.

But we see her as an incompetent single mother (Chloe Coleman plays her out-of-control and seizure-prone tween) and a slacker, but one with great people-reading skills and a dab of compassion that most everyone else depicted lacks.

Andy Garcia, as “Pharma’s fuzziest billionaire,” could have been the mercurial, eccentric scene stealer in another director’s hands. Here, he gives us a villain’s journey from eccentric to demented and demanding (more cash).

Catherine O’Hara plays Liza’s screwy, short-attention-span mother, “the only one who believed in you” who finds her way onto this gravy train at one point.

There have been movies and TV series that peeled back layers of this under-the-table practices in this world, and Netflix had its own widely-seen documentary series on this world, its practices and amorality (“Painkiller”). But the new wrinkles this “zero market share” to market-dominating firm’s story throws out there are amusing — ways to counter the competition’s bombshell saleswomen, finding downmarket doctors willing to take lucrative shortcuts in the face of the the lone contrary voice in every company (Jay Duplass) who cashes the checks but who lazily whines about “compliance.”

“Pain Hustlers” has a buzz, here and there. But the story and these characters never really get their hooks in us as Yates leans on the sentimental, takes us to an indifferent climax, and then throws in a couple of anti-climaxes to boot.

The moving scenes land flat because the movie isn’t really about victims. Blunt is good, although her Southern stripper’s accent isn’t really obvious until Liza has a court date. A canny play for sympathy from the jury?

And Evans does so many variations of his patented fast-talking spiel that it loses its effectiveness by the second act.

As the folks in this rise and fall of Pharma Frauds saga could tell you, it’s the third act where all the consequences show up and the piper must be paid. That’s where this story’s make-or-break moments are parked, and there are too few of them to let it get off the screen with as much promise as it opened with.

Rating: R for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use

Cast: Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O’Hara, Chloe Coleman, Brian d’Arcy James, Amit Shah, Jay Duplass and Andy Garcia

Credits: Directed by David Yates, scripted by Wells Towers, based on the reporting and book by Evan Hughes. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05