Newspaper editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren, left) demands answers from reporters Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) and Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe, right), who are embroiled in a case of seemingly unrelated murders in the political thriller State of Play. (Universal Studios)

In the interest of telling the truth, which is a matter of great importance in the new political thriller State of Play, I should confess that I approached this movie with an enthusiasm normally reserved for the dentist’s office. To me, the whole notion of another convoluted, can’t-trust-your-government drama just felt played out. (Throw in Ben Affleck, and it’s enough to induce night terrors.)

State of Play is an intricate study of government corruption, but it has another, more interesting narrative running just beneath the surface.

But, true to genre form, nothing here is what it initially appears to be. State of Play is indeed an intricately plotted study of government corruption, but it also has another, far more interesting narrative running just beneath its surface.

A whittled-down version of the beloved BBC miniseries, State of Play aims to grip you from the start, establishing a whiplash-inducing pace as the camera bobs and weaves through the rain-slicked streets and back alleys of Washington, D.C., on the trail of a young junkie who winds up dead.

A scruffy old-school journalist named Cal McAffrey (a charismatic Russell Crowe) arrives at the crime scene in his beat-up Saab and uses his crinkly-eyed charm to tease some details out of the cops. When word breaks that a very attractive government researcher has died in an apparent subway suicide across town, Cal’s bloodhound instincts tell him that a bigger, better story is in the works. It turns out the dead woman was the assistant and mistress of a rising congressman named Stephen Collins (Affleck), who is also McAffrey’s former college roommate and friend.

Soon, Collins is on McAffrey’s doorstep, and before you can say “conflict of interest,” the doughy scribe coaches his chum in the ways of media manipulation, offering to help build “a plausible alternative story” to save Collins’s reputation from thetaint of infidelity.

At first, the gesture seems altruistic. But the truth is, McAffrey would love some insider access to a breaking news story, since he’s been all but put out to pasture at the Washington Globe, where a young blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) is garnering accolades. Moreover, the editor in chief (Helen Mirren, delivering all of her hard-bitten one liners with gusto) has taken to calling McAffrey “geezer.”

Informant Dominic Foy (Jason Bateman, left) is grilled by McAffrey in State of Play. (Universal Studios)

After an initial faceoff in which McAffrey accuses Frye and her ilk of ignoring research in favour of “upchucking online,” the two develop a prickly friendship of sorts. They trade so many wise-ass barbs, it seems likely the two may just have eyes for each other (like Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell before them). But one of the deft touches in State of Play is that the screenwriters (Matthew Michael Carnahan, Billy Ray and Bourne brainiac Tony Gilroy) never go there; they’re content to let Crowe’s character act as a nurturing mentor to the spunky upstart.

McAffrey instructs Frye in the painstaking ways of investigative journalism, and the two discover that most roads in the case of the dead government researcher lead back to PointCorp, a Halliburton-esque multinational corporation with plans to monopolize domestic security to the tune of $40 billion. In their clandestine meetings with informants (including a scene-stealing Jason Bateman as a twitchy, pill-popping PR guy), the reporters find Collins’s name coming up repeatedly. Many first-rate twists and tense, who’s-crossing-who scenarios ensue.

But as McAffrey’s crusty editor declares, “The real story is the sinking of this bloody newspaper!” Indeed, State of Play is at its best when it’s paying loving tribute to a print industry teetering on the edge of extinction.

Director Kevin Macdonald wears his influences (like All the President’s Men) proudly on his sleeve. Some of the film’s most suspenseful sequences are played out in empty corridors, a sterile room in a hotel named The Watergate and a murky, labyrinthine parking garage where Deep Throat would have felt perfectly at home. Like that 1970s classic, State of Play is a great procedural, devoting many scenes to studying the piles of binders and dusty yellow notepads that litter a reporter’s desk. While the city’s politicians are all at home in bed (or perhaps in the beds of their mistresses), the Globe remains a beehive of activity, with McAffrey and his colleagues holding story meetings and chasing leads long into the night.

It’s a happy surprise when the most heart-stopping sequence in a thriller involves the filing of a newspaper story — a scene made all the more exciting by the depiction of the typesetting, printing and eventual delivery of the morning edition. There are some fairly implausible twists near its climax, but State of Play’s depiction of an American daily in its death throes makes what could have been a hoary conspiracy thriller feel that much more alive.

State of Play opens April 17.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.