James Ellroy's convoluted novel of crime and police corruption in post-WW II Los Angeles comes to vivid, gritty life in this suspenseful offering from director Curtis Hanson (River Wild). Ellroy's L.A. is a rapidly changing world in which there is not much difference between good and bad guys and where the advent of television and tabloid news has taken the shine off many of Hollywood's brightest stars. Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a cop who has found a niche in Hollywood as the technical advisor for a Dragnet-like police drama on television called Badge of Honor. He gains further notoriety by looking for major stars to arrest. Editor of the gossip rag Hush-Hush, Sid Hudgeons (Danny DeVito) provides him with the tips he needs to make his busts. Volatile policeman Bud White (Russell Crowe) strongly believes in the cop's unofficial code of silence when it comes to colleagues' misbehavior and therefore refuses to squeal on his partner Stensland (Graham Beckel), an unabashed racist who has brutally beaten some Mexican suspects at the police station. Straight arrow young cop Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a college graduate, does not accept the code and so tells Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) about the beating. This leads Exely to become a pariah among his peers, but this does not stop him from continuing his efforts to rid the town of gangsters. He also begins investigating a prostitution ring in which all of the girls look just like movie stars. With the main protagonists in place, the story begins at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop in the wake of an attack that left half a dozen people, notably Stensland, dead. Afterward Exely and Bud White begin an investigation that sucks them into an even thicker morass of corruption, murder, conspiracy and deceit.