You think you know what Andy Garcia‘s Diamond is going to be right from the opening scenes as we meet ’40s-style, fedora-wearing private eye Joe Diamond (Garcia), who looks, talks and walks like he is in a film noir, the kind of B&W Bogart and Mitchum regularly gravitated to. He’s all business in his aging L.A. office with his secretary, Elizabeth (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), but as he emerges into the daylight to his 1940s convertible, a Waymo drives right by in front of him. Suddenly Diamond has fooled us.

Garcia wrote, directed, stars in and composed the music with Arturo Sandoval for this wonderfully atmospheric, nostalgic and entertaining contemporary noir. His Joe Diamond is a guy who seems to have stepped in from a different era but is talented enough in solving crimes that the LAPD and district attorney learn not to ignore him, even if on the surface he looks and sounds like he might be a little loony. No, this isn’t Chinatown, Jake. It is current-day Los Angeles, and Diamond is on a new case, commissioned by the wealthy widow, Sharon Cobbs (Vicky Krieps), whose husband has mysteriously turned up dead.

Traveling across the City of Angels (there were 52 locations shot in just 25 days on a small indie budget), we see the various reactions Joe Diamond gets along the way. There also are the regulars he deals with including legal eagle “Danny Boy” McVicar (Brendan Fraser); bartender Jimbo (Bill Murray), who is well connected while serving up martinis; Dr. Harry Kleiman (a very funny Dustin Hoffman), the coroner with a thing for Chinese food; a slippery gardener named Alberto Echevarria (Demian Bichir); the Cobbs’ butler (Yul Vazquez); and mystery woman Angel (Rosemarie DeWitt) among others in the large cast Garcia scraped together with the help of his veteran casting director Cathy Sandrich, and a few favors.

Another actor in the cast playing Bruce Tannenbaum is none other than Danny Huston, son of John Huston, who directed 1942’s classic noir The Maltese Falcon, a sly touch as that was just one of many influences on the look and style of this one even if that was set in San Francisco. But Diamond also serves as a shimmering love letter to Los Angeles. The various locations are dreamlike in suggesting an L.A. that itself starred in so many of these noirs made decades ago, and with the help of ace production designer Clay A. Griffith, cinematographer Tim Suhrstedt and costume designer Deborah L. Scott, we feel like the city has stopped in time as Garcia has found vintage areas and landmarks of the city to shoot in and let this gumshoe detective do his thing in style.

I kept thinking it would be great if Joe Diamond appeared in black and white while everyone else was in color, but that would suggest that this film was really just a gimmicky tribute to a bygone era. It is much more than that, as this is a man with his own complicated traumatic and emotional past. As the story develops, it also is given great heart and gravitas because this is a three-dimensional character Garcia’s playing, thus Diamond works on multiple levels.

The all-star cast makes this a lot of fun to watch unfold. Garcia makes the title character more than a one-joke premise and really evokes a time when these gumshoes walked the streets of L.A. He himself has dreamed of bringing it to fruition for 15 years, initially coming up with a shell of the idea when helping his daughter (who is in the film) with a homework assignment. Adding strong contributions are Krieps as the femme fatale who sparks the investigation; DeWitt, who is quite touching here; and fun if too-brief appearances by Hoffman, Murray, Fraser and Bichir. There are many more, but still this is Garcia’s show both on the screen and behind it, including a beautiful score he and Sandoval cooked up, an homage as well in some ways to what Jerry Goldsmith did in Chinatown.

With L.A. production, or lack of it, in the headlines a lot now, here is a movie waving the flag for it in ways that should be noticed. Garcia knew you can’t fake L.A. in a movie like this one. It has to be authentic, and Diamond is that and more.

Producers are Garcia, Frank Mancuso Jr., Paul Soriano and Jai Stefan. It had its world premiere Tuesday night Out of Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Title: Diamond
Festival: Cannes (Out Of Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Andy Garcia
Cast: Andy Garcia, Rosemarie DeWitt, Brendan Fraser, Dustin Hoffman, Danny Huston, Bill Murray, Vicky Krieps, Robert Patrick, Rachel Ticotin, Yul Vazquez, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Demian Bichir
Sales agents: CAA Media Finance (North America), The Veterans (international)
Running time: 1 hr 58 mins