WHEN a car in Hollywood crashes through a house, an adolescent boy sneaking a midnight snack goes to investigate and finds that the dead driver is the porn model who also appears on the centrefold of the magazine stashed underneath his bed. She died wearing her working clothes!

It’s the mid-1970s. In Hollywood, enjoying the sexual revolution, Jackson (Russell Crowe) is earning a few bucks persuading child molesters to stop. Holland (Ryan Gosling) is a somewhat gormless private eye with a whip-smart 13-year-old daughter Holly (Angourie Rice).

Writer/director Shane Black brings the two men together in a tenuous professional relationship that develops by way of riotous parties where everybody drinks too much and it’s hands off the girls no matter how provocatively they are dressed or undressed. They are engaged to find Holly’s friend Amelia who may have information useful to the police. Heavies come on the scene to intervene. The California chief of the Justice Department (Kim Basinger) pays the two men big bucks to find Amelia. And the film still has about 80 minutes to run.

Will discovering what those minutes have to offer be useful? In a curious way, yes. Crowe and Gosling prove themselves to be deft comedians. The plot has far to travel before reaching resolution. The film’s noisy, acrobatic violence is funnier than violence has any right to be. All these qualities add up to cheerful escapist entertainment.

And tiny Angourie Rice from Perth, born 2001, is a knockout, evoking Jodie Foster in “Taxi Driver”.

At Palace Electric, Dendy, Capitol 6 and Hoyts