Andy Garcia’s Nostalgic, Star-Studded L.A. Noir

“Forget it Joe, it’s TikTok town,” would have been a perfect closing line for Diamond, an old-school detective flick about a wisecracking private eye stuck sometime in the 1930s or 40s but forced to live like the rest of us in the digital present.

For his sweet and very tongue-in-cheek second stab at the helm (after the ill-fated 2005 Cuban drama The Lost City), Andy Garcia tells a throwback tale of dead rich husbands and citywide corruption that’s straight out of Chinatown, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye — all classic L.A. noirs he pays due homage to here. If the novelty of his fish-out-of-water conceit eventually runs thin, Garcia brings it to a satisfying conclusion, in which a man caught in the past tries to claw his way back to the real world.

Dishing out the kind of ratatat banter that would make Bogart proud, the 70-year-old Ocean’s Eleven star plays Joe Diamond, a private dick who dresses in vintage three-piece suits, drives a 1940s Ford DeLuxe convertible and decorates his apartment like it was the setting for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. When he’s not at home sipping bourbon and listening to old records, Diamond haunts the remaining vestiges of prewar Los Angeles: the Bradbury Building, where his equally retro office is located; Cole’s French Dip, where a smug bartender played by Bill Murray serves him shots and one-liners; and Grand Central Market, where at one point he stops by to pick up Chinese takeout.

Diamond is definitely not a man of our time, but he’s forced to live in it, yielding some witty gags in which he nearly gets hit by a Waymo or has to fend off young followers who discovered him on social media. “The Flamingo guy,” is what they call him, referring to the last case he cracked, which involved missing birds. His new assignment is straight out of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane: helping a young femme fatale (Vicky Krieps) suspected of murdering her significantly older mogul of a spouse.

We’ve seen this many times before, and yet the plotting in Garcia’s script is clever enough to keep us guessing, even if doesn’t exactly keep us on the edge of our seats. The director is clearly in no rush to spin this yarn, which can make the two-hour running time feel sluggish in spots, especially when the non-stop repartee doesn’t always hit its mark. But there’s also something heartwarming about this rather sincere exercise in nostalgia, which Garcia peppers with cameos by some of his acting buddies, including Dustin Hoffman as a coroner comedian, Demián Bichir as a suspicious Latino gardener, and Danny Huston pretty much picking up where his father, John, left off in the 1974 Polanski film.

Brendan Fraser is on hand as well, playing a jerky LAPD detective who keeps stepping on Diamond’s toes, thwarting the private eye’s shrewd attempts to crack the case. If Garcia’s movie had limited itself to that investigation, it probably wouldn’t have had two legs to stand on. But a more intriguing subplot begins to take over when Diamond crosses paths with a mysterious woman in white (Rosemarie DeWitt), leading to a denouement that unlocks the secret behind his refusal to acknowledge the present.

Without giving that secret away, it’s worth noting how Garcia uses it to add some genuine sentiment to a movie that otherwise feels more like a gimmick than a good story. You can tell this was a passion project for the star — in his teary-eyed speech after the film’s premiere in Cannes, Garcia said he’d been trying to get it made for 20 years — and that passion manages to come through in Diamond, which the director himself scored along with Cuban jazz great Arturo Sandoval (whom Garcia played in a 2001 Emmy-nominated TV movie). He may no longer be of his time, and his movie may be mostly destined for folks in his own age category, but Garcia still has a thing or two to say about living and dying.