The most honest characters in L.A. Confidential (’97) are a tabloid journalist, and a cop who isn’t afraid to wield brutal violence in order to get at the truth. The opening monologue from ace Hush-Hush Magazine scooper Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) welcomes us to Los Angeles with a shrewd chuckle. This isn’t the city of opportunity it’s made out to be in the Technicolor dreams projected on screens across the United States. Instead, LA’s a wasteland; where starry-eyed youngsters travel to get their hearts broken and their bodies used. If they’re lucky, a millionaire pimp like Pierce Patchett (David Strathairn) will pay for them to get cut up to look like Jayne Mansfield, so that his high-end clientele can shell top dollar to fuck movie stars who really aren’t famous at all. Artifice is the name of the game, hiding a seedy underbelly full of double-talking monsters and the publicity-starved cops who hunt them down.

Co-writer/director Curtis Hanson was no stranger to pulp, having spent the first half of his career writing HP Lovecraft adaptations for Roger Corman (The Dunwich Horror [‘70]), and racist attack dog parables for Sam Fuller (White Dog [‘82]). This might be a solid explanation as to why he’s only the second filmmaker in cinema history to adapt famed crime author James Ellroy just right (nearly twenty years after James B. Harris’ criminally underseen Cop [‘88]). Even a master auteur like Brian De Palma got too caught up in Ellroy’s addiction to dark irony with The Black Dahlia (’06), a picture that should’ve acted as a perfect period companion piece to Hanson’s neo noir masterwork. With a hefty assist from scribe Brian Helgeland (Man on Fire [‘04]), Hanson navigates the tricky, intertwined mysteries of Ellroy’s novel, making what could’ve easily been an exposition heavy clusterfuck seem utterly natural. L.A. Confidential is a miracle of modification; streamlined and almost working better on screen than it does on the page, while still retaining its creator’s “shitbird” flair for world building and tough guy jibber-jabber.

It certainly helps that Hanson assembled a cast of character actors all seemingly on the brink of becoming bona fide superstars. Seeing a baby-faced Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce playing off each other is a treat, now that we’ve received two decades worth of work that’s helped dull the early electricity they possessed in this smoke-drenched take on Hollywood homicide (a criticism that applies more to Crowe than Pearce, to be honest). In particular, it’s fascinating to consider where L.A. Confidential places on Kevin Spacey’s resume. Despite winning a Best Supporting Oscar for The Usual Suspects (’95), Spacey was still a performer Hollywood didn’t completely know what to do with yet. Though he practically stole Seven (’95) out from under Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in the final reel of David Fincher’s morbid hit, he was simultaneously navigating ensembles or playing second fiddle in Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (’97) and mid-range adult thrillers like The Negotiator (’98).

While L.A. Confidential undoubtedly places the now iconic thespian in another galaxy of great players (with three leads, no less), Spacey’s allowed to inject a chilly sense of cool into Hanson’s pet project in a way he hadn’t in any other movie before this. His take on narcotics/vice beat and TV consultant Jack Vincennes is a shining bit of brilliance in a rather storied career. Every time Spacey is on screen, it seems like everyone sharing scenes with him is trying to rise to his level, instead of the other way around. Vincennes is a man who owns each room he walks into, glibly offering to share gossip about Robert Mitchum, or trade back alley misdeeds with Hudgens as a quid pro quo relationship of mutual scumbag reciprocity. The cop is not only the envy of all his peers, but also the women and movie stars he comes into contact with. Yet he hates himself for it. Spacey conveys this combination of brash confidence and repressed repugnance so elegantly that it caused Ellroy to label his turn as “some of the best self-loathing I’ve ever seen on screen.”