Russell Crowe (left) and Ryan Gosling's characters find common ground, albeit with difficulty at first / OUTNOW.CH

Los Angeles, the hot summer of 1977. A thick, dense smog hangs over the houses and highways, because of which citizens are advised to go out less often during the day. And in the evening, when the stuffiness dissipates, the parties begin: rich and very liberated people in parrot suits listen to a trendy song about Pina Colada, smoke marijuana, watch the latest porn films, watch girls ready for anything, swimming in special aquariums. One of the parties will end with a car flying off a hill at full speed and rushing right through someone's modest house. A fifteen-year-old boy, who has just been looking at an adult magazine, runs out through a hole in the wall to look at the car - and for the first time in his life sees a woman's breasts. At the wheel of the mangled car is a young, promising, practically naked porn star. In another minute she will die.

It soon turns out that everyone who is somehow involved in her latest project, a short independent arthouse porn film with a sharp social message that no one has seen (the film burned the day before in the director's house along with the director), is dying. And it is a nervous, hard-drinking private detective (Ryan Gosling) and a 120-kilogram thug (Russell Crowe), who helps clients solve minor unpleasant problems for pennies, who find out. They meet because they are both involved with a certain Amelia (Margaret Qualley), another actress from that same damned arthouse short film. True, at first they are involved with her for different reasons - and Crowe breaks Gosling's arm during their first date. But later this does not stop them from becoming partners and best friends - much like Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon.

There's no escaping Lethal Weapon - it's the most famous project in the career of Shane Black, who first wrote screenplays (except for Weapon and its sequels, Last Action Hero with Schwarzenegger and The Last Boy Scout with Willis), and then moved on to directing (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3). Black was born in late 1961, and it's easy to guess that the boy in the prologue with the car crash is more or less himself. He was born in Pennsylvania, but from a certain age he lived in California and, as he now says, what he remembers best is the smog and the fact that there were advertisements for porn films all over Los Angeles (it's natural for a 15-year-old to focus on that). The Nice Guys was initially set in the present day, and then Black suddenly decided to drag it back to his adolescence, adding memories of the '70s, and the films he grew up with, and his first huge success, Lethal Weapon, and his second, Boy Scout.

Blonde in crisis

Kim Basinger, the charming star of lighthearted entertainment films, won an Oscar in 1998 for L.A. Confidential and almost disappeared after that. Almost all of her films after the Oscar were passable (The Nice Guys is another of her brightest; in fact, without going to Wikipedia, the only one that can be remembered is 8 Mile). Yes, she proved that she can be a good actress when necessary, but then no one needed it. It’s always nice to see her anyway. Next year, she will grace the film Fifty Shades Darker, a sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey, which will probably be impossible to watch without her.

Black must have grown up on Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), which itself was a reimagining of '40s noir. Goodfellas is a comedy noir set at the very time Polanski was being tried for having an affair with a 13-year-old, in one of those posh Los Angeles mansions that have steep driveways in the city of sin. Black plays on the theme of underage girls in the company of wealthy libertines like a machine in his film. Of course, there's also Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), in which 13-year-old Jodie Foster plays a young prostitute. Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997), another play on old noir, with Black deliberately pairing the same actors, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger as the girl's mother. And so on – Hammett, Chandler, you yourself will name Humphrey Bogart. And besides, Black remembers very well all the little of his own that he wrote and directed (almost all of his works are listed in the previous paragraph) – he also rethinks them, rest assured. Well, and other films from his youth, like “48 Hours,” he also rethinks very well. And you, writing a review, always want to get rid of the phrase “an elderly person digests what has already been digested.”

Of course, this is a screenwriter's film. There's seemingly too much action, but Black cares more about his lines. And every time Gosling and Crowe talk, they don't talk, they just say someone else's lines. The atmosphere of the late 70s? I was 15 in 1993, too, and if I were a director, I would have least relied on myself when making a film about how adult Muscovites behaved at that time. Even the song about Pina Colada was recorded later, not in 1977, but the problem is not that Black is sloppy, but that he doesn't understand at all that the atmosphere of an era in cinema cannot be recreated from memory. If you're a director, you're targeting viewers who weren't there, and you have to create the atmosphere anew, relying on details, but inventing everything from scratch. Ideally, that's your profession - inventing everything from scratch, relying on the fragments left by others.

Black has his fans, and how can you not love the man who put the phrase “The sky is blue, the grass is green, life is shit” into Bruce Willis’s mouth? (It’s only later, as an adult, that you check it out and it turns out that it was a Russian translator’s guess; Black’s last line wasn’t “life is shit,” but “women have secrets.”) Well, yes, “Movie Hero” was a good movie. And yes, “Goodfellas” has great actors, Crowe is just crazy. And there are some very nice scenes there. But overall, you end up with a smirk on your face while watching it, not a smile. And Black wanted people to smile, or empathize, or even experience some kind of storm of emotions. But it didn’t work out.

The author is a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda

"Goodfellas" is a dark retro comedy about losers in the city of angels