We are told from the onset that “Pain Hustlers” is “inspired by real events.”

It quickly becomes clear that what that means in this case is the movie, though largely entertaining, is not telling a dramatized true tale set within the country’s opioid crisis.

Its characters — including those played by appealing leads Emily Blunt and Chris Evans — never feel all that authentic. And as for what transpires … let’s just say “Pain Hustlers” isn’t afraid to lay it on a little thick now and then.

That said, does this story of ambitious folks getting caught up in pushing doctors to prescribe a potentially harmful drug in the hopes of lining their pockets ring true at various points? Oh, sure.

Its genesis was screenwriter Wells Tower being sent journalist Evan Hughes’ 2018 New York Times article “The Pain Hustlers,” about the scandal surrounding the company Insys Therapeutics. Furthermore, the book Hughes would later write, eventually titled “Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup” and developed alongside the movie, serves very loosely as its basis.

However, “Pain Hustlers” — helmed by David Yates, the director of seven movies in the “Harry Potter” universe — is more interested in being engaging than it is in hitting hard.

It wants us to invest in Blunt’s Liza Blake, a scrappy if not always reliable single mom whom Evans’ Pete Brenner meets at the exotic dance club where she works.

Looking to do the best she can for teen daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman, “Gunpowder Milkshake”) and needing to move out of her judgemental sister’s garage, Liza takes Pete up on an offer for a sales position at Zanna, the failing Florida-based pharmaceutical company where he’s in management and works with people he despises.

Chris Evans portrays the ambitious Pete Brenner in “Pain Hustlers.” (Betina La Plante/Netflix/TNS)

She is given just one week to hook a “whale” — a doctor who will prescribe the company’s fentanyl-based drug, Lonafen, intended to relieve pain in cancer patients. With much effort, she finds that whale, Brian d’Arcy James’ Dr. Lydell, whom Chloe refers to at one point as “Doctor Sketchball.”

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Soon, more prescriptions are being written by more doctors, money is flowing into Zanna and rules increasingly are being bent and broken by drug reps and docs alike.

While Liz and Pete are making the highly profitable moves, the puppetmaster is Zanna head Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia). He talks of creating the drug because the idea of his wife being in pain while she died of cancer broke his heart but is obsessed with the company maintaining its incredible growth rate.

Yates and Tower want us to have someone to root for, so Emily — after buying an incredible home and paying “enhanced tuition” at her daughter’s exclusive private school — develops a conscience. She worries about what doctors agreeing to prescribe Lonafen for not-FDA-approved uses will mean for patients and wants to take steps to make Zanna less of a target for the feds. However, Jack — an increasingly paranoid germaphobe who has worked to isolate himself from the actions of his employees — isn’t interested.

Thanks to the almost always compelling Blunt (“Edge of Tomorrow,” “A Quiet Place”), it is, in fact, pretty easy to care about what happens to Liza, whose motivation for (eventually) doing the right thing includes her daughter’s need for a pricy medical procedure. She’s no angel, Blunt is so good that we forget that for big stretches of “Pain Hustlers.”

It’s a little harder to worry about what will become of Pete, a character given little dimension by Tower and Yates and who, for some reason, has been provided with a distracting Boston accent by Beantown native Evans (“Avengers: Endgame,” “Knives Out”).

We wouldn’t have minded a bit more screen time for Garcia (“Expend4bles”), who adds a little color to “Pain Hustlers” as the eccentric if ultimately loathsome Jack.

Likewise, the film doesn’t find quite enough for the talented Catherine O’Hara (“Best in Show,” “Schitt’s Creek”) to do as Jackie, Liza’s loose-cannon mother, whom she hires to be a sales representative. (What could go wrong there?)

“Pain Hustlers” doesn’t ignore the damage the drug is doing to the people taking it and their loved ones, but that isn’t where its focus lies. The movie wants to be “The Wolf of Wall Street” rather than something akin to the excellent Hulu limited series “Dopesick.” As a result, it feels a bit slight, short story writer Tower’s lack of screenwriting experience perhaps showing a bit.

On the other hand, in Yates’ hands, it’s brisk and punchy. There’s simply something to be said from any streaming offering that doesn’t stagnate.

“Pain Hustlers” shines more light on a shady and dangerous world, one in which doctors are incentivized to write prescriptions and where profit can be more important to some than quality health care. It isn’t the first work to do that, and it isn’t the best.

But at least it has Emily Blunt.

‘Pain Hustlers’

Where: Netflix.

When: Oct. 27.

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

Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.

A federal judicial panel has turned down a bid to allow live television coverage of two historic criminal trials of former President Donald Trump scheduled for next year.

Without apparent dissent, a committee that handles potential changes to the federal courts’ criminal rules concluded Thursday that it had no ability to alter the existing ban on broadcasting federal criminal trials. Thirty-eight Democratic House members and some media outlets had requested that the rules be changed or an exception be created to allow Trump’s looming federal trials to be televised.

“We have an absolute rule,” said the panel’s secretary, or “reporter,” Duke Law Professor Sara Sun Beale. “We have no authority to authorize exceptions to an across-the-board, straight rule.”

The head of the Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules, U.S. District Judge James Dever, also said the glacial pace federal law prescribes for amending federal court rules means that, even if the panel approved a change, it wouldn’t take effect until 2026 or 2027.

The slow amendment procedures are “a feature, not a bug,” said Dever, who sits in Raleigh, N.C. “Once a rule becomes a rule, it’s the law. It’s not advice. It’s the law.”

Trump is facing two federal criminal cases: one in Washington, D.C. stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and another in Florida stemming from his retention of sensitive national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago compound after leaving the White House. The D.C. trial is currently set to open in March, with the Florida trial set to follow in May, barring delays.

The former president and current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination also faces state-level criminal charges in New York and Georgia. Proceedings in the Georgia case, where four of Trump’s co-defendants have already pleaded guilty, are being streamed live on YouTube, and any trial is expected to receive TV coverage. Criminal court proceedings in New York are not open to cameras.

While the committee said it was powerless to impact the federal Trump trials, it did agree Thursday to establish a subcommittee to look at whether the existing rule should be changed to allow for exceptions in extraordinary cases or perhaps to allow broadcasting in any criminal case where the judge deems it appropriate. The review will be headed by U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad, who sits in Charlotte, N.C.

After less than 15 minutes of discussion at a meeting Thursday in Minneapolis, the advisory panel agreed on its response to the Trump-focused request. One member — U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey — said drafting the official response to the lawmakers was a delicate matter.

“It’s just somewhat tricky,” Harvey said, in an apparent recognition that the commitment to study the issue is unlikely to satisfy the lawmakers. The committee’s plan, Harvey said, probably is not “ever going to provide these members of Congress with what they want with respect to these Trump trials.”

Harvey sits in Washington D.C., and has handled many criminal cases stemming from the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. He is not involved in Trump’s case.

The lawmakers, led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), wrote in August to the federal judiciary’s policymaking arm, the Judicial Conference, asking the body to “explicitly authorize” live broadcasting proceedings in the cases special counsel Jack Smith has brought against Trump.

“If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses,” Schiff and his colleagues wrote.

Spokespeople for Schiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the committee’s action.

Earlier this month, lawyers for a coalition of news organizations, including POLITICO, sent the Judicial Conference a similar request to change the rule against broadcasting or otherwise allow an exception for the Trump trial set to open in D.C. in March.

“We all share an equal stake in the historic trial of our former President. Without cameras in the courtroom, the public will not have equal opportunity to assess the process and the result,” the letter said.

Dever called the submission from the press “very thoughtful,” before announcing the broader policy issue would be passed to a subcommittee for study.

In addition to the effort to persuade judiciary branch officials to change the court’s rules, media outlets have asked the judge assigned to the Washington trial, Tanya Chutkan, to allow TV broadcasting of the trial notwithstanding the current rules. Various news organizations, including POLITICO, are backing formal legal motions filed with the court earlier this month.

Chutkan has ordered prosecutors to respond to the requests by next week. She has not solicited a response from Trump’s attorneys, although Trump has said he supports “transparency” in the court cases he is facing.

One veteran Justice Department lawyer involved in responding to the media request to Chutkan, Elizabeth Shapiro, was present at the meeting Thursday but told the group she was there solely as a guest. She did not speak during the discussion on the Trump trials.

A federal law passed by Congress in 2020 to address the coronavirus pandemic allowed federal criminal proceedings to take place by video or audio conferencing, but that provision expired soon after the health national emergency ended in May.

While the coronavirus provision was in effect, many federal courts allowed members of the press or public to access those virtual proceedings online, although broadcasting remained formally prohibited. The federal courts are continuing to allow remote access to some civil proceedings, but almost all trial-court action in federal criminal cases can only be observed in person.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, fresh off a brutal three-week stint as caretaker speaker, revealed Thursday how exasperating the episode was and sounded less than confident about the House GOP’s ability to maintain its newfound unity: “We’ll see.”

The North Carolina Republican dished to reporters a day after he relinquished the gavel to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) — and also quietly announced his own reelection campaign for an 11th term. McHenry was a top deputy to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy but said, “I have not talked to Speaker Johnson at all.”

“Kevin duct-taped the conference together pretty well for 10 months,” McHenry said at the Capitol. “The last three weeks made it look easy in comparison.”

McHenry revealed what he was thinking in the moments after he became acting speaker pro tempore and gave the gavel bang heard around the world: “Pure anger.”

McHenry said he did some “light research” about how to do the job two weeks out from McCarthy’s ouster, “and then a whole lot more as it got closer.”

He and McCarthy had not discussed how he would approach the role, McHenry said, “because we didn’t think it would take three weeks.”

McHenry described an attempt to stay above the fray as he held the House together. He said he rejected multiple requests by Republicans and Democrats for him to act on legislation.

“I was focused on my role and being a facilitator and a steward of the office,” McHenry said. “Less caught up in candidacies and much more focused on making sure we had a transition.”

Can Republicans stay united going forward?

“We’re all going to see it together,” he said. “We’re all going to see it live.”

He said Republicans and Democrats have to come together as the House turns to appropriations legislation and responding to the wars in Israel and Ukraine.

“We have a world on fire,” McHenry said. “That has to be wrestled with, and there’s no getting around it.”

McHenry said he’s turning back to his work as chair of the House Financial Services Committee. His top priorities include passing a pair of bills that would overhaul how the U.S. regulates cryptocurrency.

“I’ve got a stack of policy that I want to get into end-of-year packages,” he said. “That’s what I’m focused on.”

McHenry announced his reelection late Wednesday but he’ll be term-limited as the top Republican on the Financial Services Committee in 2025. He was mum on whether he’d seek a waiver to get around the GOP rule.

“I’m not prepared to talk about it,” McHenry said. “Let me have at least a little comedown off the speaker pro tem thing.”