L.A. Confidential the movie shares that virtue; in style, it could almost be called post-postmodern. The filmmakers know they're contributing to a century of crime dramas, but their focus is on the story, not on their relationship to the canon. In the noir exercises that followed Pulp Fiction, crime is little more than an excuse for flighty pop-culture digressions, stylized violence, and winking references to other movies. In contrast, L.A. Confidential is pleasingly straightforward and square: Dirty deeds are motivated by the same grubby human motivations--money, jealousy, lust--that made Mike Hammer swat people senseless. The movie isn't an homage to hard-boiled detective fiction; it's the real McCoy.

The story hinges upon the rivalry among three LAPD cops: Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), a straight arrow with ruthless leadership ambitions; Bud White (Russell Crowe), a flawed bruiser with a dark past and a vendetta against wife-beaters; and Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a smoothie who serves as technical advisor to a Dragnet-style cop show. In the book, their grudges slow-burn over an entire decade, stoked by a labyrinthine plot that involves a dozen unsolved cases, a million tangled allegiances, and the simultaneous rise of the smut industry and of Disneyland.

But the movie doesn't have six hours to tell the postwar history of Southern California. So screenwriters Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson miraculously trace the action back to a single gruesome event--the slaying of a half-dozen patrons at an all-night eatery called the Nite Owl. What follows is classic noir intrigue: a sultry blonde (Kim Basinger) with a deliberate resemblance to Veronica Lake; a shady procurer (David Strathairn, looking like a fusion of Walt Disney and Howard Hughes); and, behind the scenes, a scuzzy scandal-mag editor (Danny DeVito) with a finger in every poisoned pie.

As director, Hanson doesn't even try to approximate Ellroy's Western Union prose, too trigger-happy half the time for verbs. (From a near-haiku of an Ellroy gunfight: "Shrieks from the courtyard; running feet on gravel.... Over to the men, tasting blood--point-blank head shots.") But Hanson does the next best thing: He doesn't waste a second of screen time on anything that doesn't shove the story forward. L.A. Confidential has a lot of the same elements as last year's lumbering Mulholland Falls, in which every shot looked suitable for framing, but Hanson doesn't sit around waiting for us to acknowledge how cool everything is. The glamourpuss gloss of Dante Spinotti's cinematography becomes a continuing incidental pleasure, not the point of every scene.

Same goes for the actors, who inhabit the '50s milieu without resorting to conscious imitation--except for Kevin Spacey, who was encouraged by Hanson to keep Dean Martin in mind. He saunters through the movie with a suave charm that offsets the movie's dueling leads, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce, two fine Australian actors who deliver smashing performances. Pearce makes Exley's by-the-book rigidity admirable and obnoxious in equal amounts--just what the character demands--while Crowe is a thuggish wonder as Bud White. In a triple-digit supporting cast, James Cromwell erases all memories of Babe's genial farmer as an opportunistic bastard of an Irish lieutenant.

L.A. Confidential does a masterful job of condensing Ellroy's myriad subplots into a workable whole. Trimmed as it is, the plot still expresses the novelist's vision of Los Angeles, and of America, as a world that cons itself with illusions of morality and righteousness, while its leaders traffick behind the scenes in death and depravity. The nobler the ideal, the bigger the lie. If there's any quibble about what Hanson and Helgeland kept or deleted, it's that the novel's most resonant plot thread--a grotesque string of child murders that parallels the rise of a Disney surrogate--has been excised entirely. So have some of the heroes' gamier exploits.