Last year, I saw Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I didn’t like it.

It was a fun movie, but there was something just sleazy about it. And I’ve seen my fair share of sleaziness. I guess what just felt off about the movie was that it felt like a slapstick comedy trying to be a buddy-cop comedy. It didn’t help that there were a lot of “no homo” jokes thrown in there for good measure. I love Robert Downey Jr, but that film just didn’t do it for me.

However, The Nice Guys did.

Set in the 1970s during the height of the pornography industry in Hollywood, The Nice Guys stars Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as two down-on-their-luck PIs who find themselves embroiled in a conspiracy involving a missing porn star Amelia. They both harbor a lot of contempt towards each other, but as the film goes on and the stakes are raised, they start to realize they have a lot more to lose than the missing Margaret Qualley.

It’s refreshing to see a film about the porn industry treat the players involved less like objects and more like people. The opening scene involves a car crashing through a suburban home, with the victim, a porn star by the stage name Misty Mountain, thrown naked against a rock as she lays dying. When a young boy who witnessed the crash walks up and sees her, he covers her body with his pajama shirt. Considering that the young boy was reading one of his dad’s porn magazines a few seconds earlier, it’s a surprisingly sweet gesture.

When we first meet Amelia, she has tears in her eyes as she hands an address to Russell Crowe’s Healy, who comes off like a protective father figure. He doesn’t think much of himself, but his reputation as a sort-of-but-not-really upstanding citizen makes him one of the few people Amelia can trust. When we start to get pulled deeper into the industry Amelia and Misty Mountains were a part of, we start to realize that while the porn industry has plenty of problems of its own, it’s still just a business, one that brings people together.

There’s a constant thread of Ryan Gosling’s March and Crowe’s Healy complaining at how innocent young people used to be. It’s a conversation every generation has at some point with itself, but it’s more prescient in this film. The 1960s were supposed to be a time where young people took over and embraced new freedoms and values. However, instead of changing the way people saw things, people grew disenchanted with the excess of drugs and sex and started to retreat into themselves. Once we start learning more about Amelia’s past and who she was involved with, the quest becomes less about March and Healy getting their groove back and more about restoring their own faith in humanity. Amelia might not be perfect, but she was trying her best to make the world a better place.

Angourie Rice’s Holly is a good complementary shade to Amelia. She’s a precocious 13 year-old who invites herself along to her dad’s dangerous investigations, but she’s surprisingly resourceful and willful, even managing to navigate a party at a porn star’s house. There’s a tragic undercurrent to this though, as her relationship with her dad March is less than a happy one. They both hold affection for one another, but the loss of Holly’s mother and March’s survivor’s guilt over failing to save her is gut-wrenching once you stop and think about it. In some ways, Holly has already grown up and became her dad’s caretaker, instead of the other way around.

What’s refreshing about The Nice Guys is that while the women act as moral anchors to the men in the story, they’re not seen as saints. It also helps that the men repeatedly ignore their advice and still end up on their own two feet. However, both Amelia and Holly feel like sisters despite sharing a limited number of screens together. While it’s easy to look at the 1970s as a decade where everybody had a hangover after the Swinging 60s, Shane Black looks at this decade with a shade of fondness. People were crazy, sure, but they were also looking out for each other at a time where most didn’t. That’s more or less what happens to March and Healy too.

Like most married couples, March and Healy don’t get along very often, and you find yourself wondering whether they’re going to kill each other or kiss. But even if they don’t do the latter (shame), there’s a clear layer of affection. They both see their fuck-ups in the other person, and they want to protect what’s left.

The Nice Guys is actually really nice.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

• I knew this film was going to be good when “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” started playing in the opening scene.
• I could see Ken foreshadowing every time Ryan Gosling wheezed or screamed.
• Did alcoholism in the 70s give you superpowers? March and Healy sustained so many concussions it’s incredible they were still coherent.