At the heart of L.A. Confidential is the relationship between Bud White (Russell Crowe), a tough, sad-eyed, loyal young cop who wants to do the right thing but is painfully suspended in a state of suppressed fury by department superiors who use his brawn for their back-room intimidation sessions, and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a rule-book model officer whose ambition and unyielding standards do not make him popular with the rank and file. There's plenty not to like about both. One of the beauties of the film is that it never rushes our sympathies; it gives us just enough about each man to interest us as the film's convoluted plot lines slowly come together for full gallop to the finish. Only in the final scenes of the film do we experience -- all the more powerfully for it being something of a surprise -- a depth of feeling and of respect for them both.

One of their colleagues is Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a guy who's gotten so smooth he can't stop himself from outrageous displays of verbal smarminess -- even though we can see there's an acrid taste of self-loathing, or at least self-fatigue, when he does it. Vincennes is adviser to the TV cop show Badge of Honor and something of a minor celebrity. He takes small pay-offs and we sense that his inner barometer about what's too small to bother with or too vile to touch is less reliable than it used to be. He turns his head so often it's in a perpetual swivel. Spacey is extraordinarily adroit at making Vincennes, at once, faintly disgusting and touchingly sympathetic. When he tries to turn what we know could be a big corner in his life, we root for him; and it hurts when he answers Exley's question about why he became a cop. It's Spacey's most galvanizing moment: There's an attempt at the usual glibness, followed by a wide-eyed, wordless, straining at truth; followed by the actual, crushing truth: "I don't remember." Vincennes is the perfect cop for a world founded on duplicity; he's acting, and he's been acting for so long that he's forgotten to remember where all the bodies are buried. Too late he realizes that among them is his own.

Danny DeVito is exuberantly trashy as Sid Hudgens, verminish reporter for Hush-Hush magazine. He and Vincennes occasionally trade favors: Jack'll set up the vice bust of a starlet and tip Sid to be there with his cameras. James Cromwell plays Lieutenant Dudley Smith as a benign Irish patriarch and, amazingly, does so without resorting to cliche. It's a cunningly crafted performance and should dispel the notion, held in some quarters, that his Oscar nomination three years ago for his role as the farmer in Babe was a fluke. As Pierce Patchett, an elegantly tailored Brentwood gentleman who runs a high-class string of hookers -- whom he sends to hairdressers or even plastic surgeons to heighten their resemblance to stars of the day -- David Straitharn continues a string of low-key, but vividly eccentric, performances that are mesmerizing in their variety.

It's hard to imagine any two actors being more suited, more innately right, than Crowe and Pearce for the two leads. Which is precisely the point. In one of the smarter moves made on any major film this year, Hanson wisely avoided using better-known stars (and managed to talk the producers into it). The payoff for the audience is enormous; we are allowed to experience fully our seduction by the film's suspense, its sensuousness, its ideas -- because we are not distracted with projecting star expectations onto the personas on the screen. There's nothing to get in the way of the good work here, and it's very good, indeed; the characterizations are finely drawn. Even the physical opposition of the actors' good looks have room to work -- Crowe's heaviness of experience sits uneasily on his brow; Pearce's chiseled righteousness is matched by his cheekbones.

In another instance, it's hard to imagine how what the audience does know about an actor's historical baggage could add more to a performance.The face that is most familiar among the cast of L.A. Confidential belongs to Kim Basinger. Her performance as Lynn Bracken, a Veronica Lake lookalike from Patchett's agency, accrues its emotional heft precisely because moviegoers have watched her migration in recent years from blonde sexpot, to would-be dramatic and comedic actor, to owner of a small town in Georgia, to bankruptcy and box-office poison after being sued for conduct deemed unbecoming by a major studio, to marriage to Alec Baldwin, motherhood, and a measured, modest come-back. It's all there. And it makes her love for Officer White nearly unbearable in its wounded tough-cookie need.

Hanson and Helgeland have handled the neat convolutions of Ellroy's crime thriller with cinematic finesse, and even though Hanson's sense of pace and stylistic integrity is sinuous and sophisticated, the real fuel here -- as in the noir classics of the '40s and early '50s -- is emotion. Last week, speaking at the fifth Film Preservation Festival, director Martin Scorsese said of those films: "They were about descending into a labyrinth where anything can happen, including the death of the protagonist."

For 135 minutes, L.A. Confidential takes us with it on such a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we'll go to hell or, if we do, whether we'll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes -- one of whom, not long before, we'd taken to be a psychotic thug and the other a reptilian prig -- to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.