'Limitless' Refresher Guide: Get Caught Up on the Bradley Cooper Film Before CBS's Small Screen Adaptation Premieres
Bradley Cooper’s first big solo star vehicle, Limitless, may only have come out four years ago, but that’s an eternity in movie time. And the actor’s been super busy since then, playing, among other roles, an American sniper, an American hustler, and a wet hot American summer camp counselor. So it’s understandable if your memory of Cooper’s role as Eddie Morra, who goes from zero to hero courtesy of a brainy drug called NZT, is a little fuzzy. With the TV version of Limitless — which continues the story told in the film and even features Eddie in a recurring role — premiering this week, here’s our mind-expanding refresher guide.
Meet Eddie Morra, a failing novelist and all-around slacker who moved to New York with visions of grandeur, only to end up living in a crummy one-room apartment in a dilapidated Chinatown walk-up. His wife Melissa (Anna Friel) divorced him, his girlfriend Lindy (Abbie Cornish) ditched him, and his literary agent is ready to cancel his contract. But a chance encounter with his former brother-in-law Vernon (Johnny Whitworth) turns his life around. Vernon, you see, is in the pharmaceutical field and has access to a cutting-edge drug that only a few select people have sampled.
Why the secrecy? Because NZT radically alters your brain chemistry, allowing you to become smarter, funnier, sexier, and all-around better than you’ve ever been in your life. A single pill is all it takes for the previously unlucky Eddie to, in order, get laid, clean his apartment, and write ninety amazing pages of his unwritten manuscript. But when he goes back for more, his pusher is dead, leading an addicted Eddie to swipe his stash for himself. By the way, you’ll see that situation repeated in the Limitless pilot, where the show’s hero, Brian Finch (Jake McDorman), goes to get more of that sweet, sweet NZT only to find his supplier dead. You can tell the drug is awesome, because people are willing to kill for it.
With a now-robust stock of NZT on hand, Eddie pretty much writes the best book anyone has ever written. But because the drug encourages you to keep moving forward rather than repeating yourself, he instantly pivots into a career as a financial world tycoon, developing a predictive system that pulls in oodles of money for both himself and Wall Street robber barons like Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). And while he’s used his big brain to convince Lindy to give him a second chance, he’s not above playing the field when a beautiful model type crosses his path. But then one of those model types turns up dead not long after their hotel rendezvous, and Eddie quickly becomes the police’s prime suspect. (It’s worth noting that acting like a Bonfire of the Vanities reject isn’t a side effect of NZT; on the show, Brian uses his powers to help people, from his father to the FBI. There’s already something inside Eddie that makes him crave money, fame and attention — the drug just enhances it.)
Even if Eddie is guilty of her murder, he wouldn’t remember it. As he keeps popping pills, he also loses time, fast-forwarding through his life until people and places become blurs. That intense pace comes to an immediate standstill when his NZT supply is exhausted at last, sending him into a withdrawal so intense, it makes the Trainspotting detox sequence look like a Disneyland ride. That’s the precise moment when trouble arrives in the form of Gennady (Andrew Howard), the Russian ne’er-do-well to whom he owes a significant chunk of cash. With Lindy’s help, he’s able to get more pills, but Gennady is now hip to NZT as well, requiring Eddie to go to extreme lengths to ensure his own safety. Inevitably, the loan shark comes looking to collect and reveals that he’s found an even more effective way of ensuring a longer high: shooting NZT via needle rather than swallowing it.
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Encapsulating the kind of irony that Alanis sings about, Eddie winds up killing Gennady with that needle and the movie jumps ahead one year to reveal that he’s added “Senatorial candidate” to his résumé. Van Loon drops by his campaign office to reveal that he too has discovered NZT and even went so far as to purchase the company that makes it, with the intention of making Morra his inside man in the Senate. But Eddie turns the tables on his would-be blackmailer, revealing that he’s already purchased a few of his own laboratories and has them working on making their own versions, without the side effects. More importantly, he insists that he’s completely drug free and that all his achievements are his and his alone. Except…
Warning: Spoilers for the series premiere below.
As Tuesday’s premiere reveals, now-Senator Eddie Morra is totally lying. He’s still receiving regular doses of NZT, using a variation on the injection method that Gennady (RIP) pioneered. And in keeping with his always-evolving ambitions, he’s preparing for a presidential run. Meanwhile, the mythology surrounding NZT continues to grow, bringing the drug to the attention of the FBI. The series also picks up on an idea that’s hinted at in the movie: that many of the country’s most successful men are secret drug addicts. Looking at the lineup of real world presidential candidates, that explains so much…
Limitless premieres on Sept. 22 at 10 p.m. on CBS.
