Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is a narcotics detective who moonlights as a technical advisor on Badge of Honor, a popular TV police drama series. He is providing Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), publisher of the Hush-Hush tabloid magazine, with tips about celebrity arrests that will attract more readers to Hudgens' magazine. When he becomes involved in Hudgen's scheme to set up actor Matt Reynolds (Simon Baker) in a homosexual tryst with L.A. district attorney Ellis Loew (Ron Rifkin), and Reynolds is killed as a result, Vincennes becomes determined to find the killer.