American Pain

Foster tackles this material in the high-velocity fashion common to many stranger-than-fiction documentaries about people gleefully living outside the law. There is a lot for him to work with, one vivid and outlandish anecdote spilling into another.

It’s hard to think of a prior chronicle quite so luridly indicting as American Pain.

Foster’s research and storytelling are very satisfying, even if the results aren’t. Many of those involved wound up serving prison time, but of course it was far too short, too gentle and not served in the same cells as the Big Pharma execs who made this horror story possible.

The cold irony that Foster provocatively presents is that if the idiocy surrounding pain clinics hadn’t become too gross and widespread for the authorities to ignore, people like the Georges might still be getting rich off of addiction today.

Being appalled by people who get their comeuppance is always entertaining, and American Pain fills that bill, though the misbehavior Mr. Foster chronicles is so shameless that viewers might start to lose their bearings.

Ultimately, American Pain perpetuates the media’s dangerous pattern of humanizing white criminals under the guise of moral disdain.

The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.