The Nice Guys

In 1977 Los Angeles, alcoholic private eye Holland March and hired enforcer Jackson Healy team up to find a missing teenager named Amelia Kuttner after a fading porn star dies in a crash. Their trail runs through the porn industry, an activist circle, and a conspiracy that ties a Justice Department official to Detroit auto executives. Those executives are trying to bury emissions-control technology. The case plays as a violent buddy neo-noir comedy. March’s sharp thirteen-year-old daughter Holly keeps tagging along and often outthinks the adults.

The film has little woke content on screen. The core story is buddy bungling, the porn underworld, murder, and a dirty emissions cover-up. Amelia’s anti-pollution film works mainly as a plot device, and Holly’s competence serves parent-child comedy rather than an identity arc. Villains include unaccountable official power and auto-industry players, and the ending stresses that Detroit still gets away while smaller players burn. That reads as period noir cynicism about pollution politics and corruption, not modern identity activism or culture-war messaging.