From Captain America to a personal injury lawyer with a voracious coke habit. Chris Evans plots a strange course, and he will no doubt have been warned that a film like Puncture makes neither money nor sense. Both are undoubtedly true. That he did it anyway is the mark of a man who might yet confound the trajectory of his earlier Human Torch.

A 1999 study revealed that 800,000 so-called needlestick injuries occurred every year in the United States alone. Overwhelmingly affecting nurses and other front-line health workers, such injuries were not only life threatening, but shockingly preventable. The hospitals knew it, the insurance companies knew it, and Jeffrey Dancort could prove it. He had invented a safety needle that was impossible to reuse, accidently or otherwise. Even so, Dancort was not a greedy man: he demanded neither financial reward nor a long career protecting his patents. All he wanted was to see his needle in every hospital in America.

Every hospital in America said no.

The reasons why amount to money, as they often do. Just a handful of purchasing groups managed two-thirds of the industry’s supply contracts, representing agreements worth some 35 billion dollars. Dancort alleged they had colluded to prevent him from even getting as far as demonstrating his product, let alone lobbying doctors and nurses for its uptake. Puncture documents just one woman whose life could have been dramatically altered had those companies behaved otherwise, yet it could have picked from 799,999 more.

This is a movie to be angry about. I’m not sure it is necessarily a great movie, but it’s certainly a clearer, more furious one than The Lincoln Lawyer. Where that relied on style and charisma to make up for its many deficiencies, Puncture is purposefully ugly. Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) is a hungry young lawyer just barely getting by. His talents are beyond doubt, but these can be no day in court to prove his brilliance when sitting opposite are a dozen highly paid attorneys, flanked on either side by a dozen more. That’s just how justice works.

Even if it wasn’t, Weiss is rarely in a fit state to help it along. He lives in what amounts to a drug-den, aimlessly indulging his nightly habits of drugs and prostitutes. He misses important meetings, and those he does attend are necessarily bookended by visits to the bathroom. When he and his partner meet with the sole senator willing to lobby their case, she discovers him bleeding and incoherent. Weiss cares profoundly, and still he self-destructs.

The film’s failing is in being too enamoured by the cult of personality. That’s understandable given Evans’ muscular and, ironically, rather subtle portrayal: he doesn’t hooah his way through the scenery, because Weiss is enough of a force without magnifying him further. But the issues at stake – and our outrage towards them – should be central, and they are not. There are ways to make that other kind of movie – Michael Mann did as as much with ‘The Insider’ – and yet Steven Zaillian’s ‘A Civil Action’ offers the most relevant example of how an incendiary personality can be made to supplement the larger, more impactful legal dramas contained therein.

Puncture remains a good movie, if not quite the one the story deserves. Evans is a revelation, and Brett Cullen is fittingly odious for the defence. These things are worthy of your time, and they will leave you with a renewed sense of injustice. That’s good for the soul.