The beauty part of Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn is that it’s hardboiled to its core. Some Raymond Chandler homages put a trench coat on their protagonist, throw on some smoky jazz, and call it a day (*cough* Spider-Noir *cough*), but this is a true gumshoe tale, complete with duskily atmospheric locations, existential crises, and dialogue as smooth as well-aged whisky.

Ray (Sam Rockwell) is the last human P.I. in a world where aliens and robots can do the job better, or at least cheaper. The film’s retro-futuristic metropolis is built on the same ’60s pulp-fiction blueprint as Bird’s The Incredibles. It’s the world of tomorrow as imagined yesterday: classic cars that fly through the air, free-floating screens with black-and-white pictures, and other amazing technologies housed in big, boxy machines.

The setting gives Ray Gunn free rein to deploy imaginative high-tech gadgets—his Poké Ball-like blaster is especially fun—while retaining the tactile quality of detective tales from the pre-digital world. Characters might travel by jetpack and blast each other with laser guns, but incriminating documents still arrive on sheets of paper, tucked neatly inside manila envelopes.

Like any good hero cast in the rumpled mold of Philip Marlowe, Ray is perpetually broke. Whenever a decent payday comes along, he turns it down on ethical grounds, much to the chagrin of his cycloptic alien partner, Eye-Rah (Tom Waits, who was surely born to play a gravel-voiced P.I. in a space-age fantasy world). Eye-Rah is a great partner to have, not only for the world-weary counsel he provides but also because he’s essentially a walking spy camera, with an eye that can take photographs. It’s a charmingly inventive bit of character design, each shot accompanied by the explosive “whumpf” of an old-fashioned flash-powder camera.

Just as their luck and funds seem to have run out, they land a case that satisfies both Ray’s moral standards and Eye-Rah’s desire to pay his rent. Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson) is a chart-topping singer with a fiery temper, a new album on the way, and representatives eager to avoid another public scandal, so they hire Ray to keep an eye on her. Naturally, this seemingly straightforward job entangles them in a web of murders, mistresses, and look-alikes. It goes without saying that Ray falls in love with Venus, who turns out to be much more than meets the eye. (“She’s a tortured artist,” Ray is warned. “The art is expensive, but the torture, that’s free!”)

Ray Gunn delivers plenty of visual fireworks and fast-paced action, all stylishly animated with a believable sense of heft. When someone gets socked in the jaw, it looks like it hurts. But a surprising amount of the film consists of Ray and Eye-Rah quietly discussing their line of work and the difficulty of making a living while acting with any sort of conscience.

The film remains reasonably family-friendly, with the darker shades of its film-noir trappings handled with a P.I.’s discretion: Love affairs are merely alluded to, while murders are committed with bloodless laser weapons. But its willingness to slow down and chew over big, cynical ideas confirms Ray Gunn as a genuine noir story rather than a kids’ cartoon doing an impression of one. It helps that Bird and Matthew Robbins’s script is stocked with wryly funny, thoughtful dialogue. When Ray insists to Eye-Rah that corrupt people are stupid, his partner wistfully responds, “And yet they seem to live so much better than us.”

There are moments during Ray’s investigation when you wish the film would place a little more faith in its audience’s deductive abilities. When he checks his notes to recall the name of a club Venus mentioned, for instance, the film replays the audio of her talking about it rather than trusting us to put two and two together. This feels a little like Netflix-itis: a moment that exists purely for viewers who might be busy scrolling on their phones. There’s also a central mystery involving Venus that most viewers will figure out long before the final reveal.

But detective stories like these are never really about uncovering the facts, which invariably turn out to be both dizzyingly complicated and grubily predictable anyway: powerful people doing violent things because they want to and can. They’re about suave verbal sparring, clever cat-and-mouse games, and the particularly romantic strain of melancholy that comes from seeking truth in a world where finding it can only mean heartbreak. And Ray Gunn has all that in spades.