Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdam shine in 'Spotlight'

WHEN THE reporters in the phenomenal newspaper movie "Spotlight" go digging for their story, they start in the basement of their own building.

In the old days, when dinosaur media roamed the Earth, every big-city newspaper had a substantial library, and in that library was a cavernous file room full of print clippings - hard copies of articles often going back a century or more.

These clippings comprised a unique version of the city's history - unscanned, beyond the reach of search algorithms.

History, and something else - more like a city's memory. Anodyne facts, colorful passions, straight news, personal perspective, things the city is happy to remember, things it would just as soon forget.

In the fact-based "Spotlight," a team of Boston Globe journalists scour that memory bank, searching for pieces of a shameful past that help reveal an ongoing scandal. "Spotlight" recounts the Globe's investigation and reporting of efforts by the Archdiocese of Boston, spanning decades, to conceal the activities of more than 90 pedophile priests.

The movie is itself an admirable feat of journalism - a concise, lucid, absorbing narrative built around an accelerating cascade of revelations. All assembled by writer-director Tom McCarthy, a sometime actor who's gathered and managed a skilled and beautifully meshed ensemble of Michael Keaton and John Slattery as editors, and Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo and Brian d'Arcy James as reporters.

Liev Schreiber plays introverted managing editor Marty Baron, who wants to stop covering priest scandals piecemeal and start looking at them as part of an organized and ongoing institutional problem within the Catholic Church.

The reporters regard Baron suspiciously. He's been brought in to preside over newsroom staff reductions and is seen as a potential hatchet man - make that scalpel man, hired (they fear) to administer death by a thousand job cuts.

Whatever "Spotlight" has to say about the decline of newspapers, though, is there by inference, well to the background.

In the foreground is its taut, quietly thrilling investigative procedural, each scene a small marvel of solid writing and acting.

McAdams is Sacha Pfeiffer, who takes a fresh look at the presumed kooks and gadflies who've long pestered the Globe to take a more serious look at abuse claims.

Ruffalo is Mike Rezendes, who pursues a frightened, wary attorney (Stanley Tucci) representing victims.

Keaton is Walter "Robby" Robinson, who buttonholes the slick lawyer (Billy Crudup) who acts on behalf of the church and who's turned off-the-record settlements into a "cottage industry."

Schreiber does wonders with a role that requires him to be muted and self-contained. Watch him quietly deflect pressure and intimidation during Baron's "friendly" sit-down with Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), who wants Baron to preserve the status quo.

The editor does no such thing, of course. The Globe researches the story exhaustively, compiles it unassailably and prints an article that lays most of the responsibility for the scandal at the feet of church leaders.

But not all of the responsibility. The scandal is sprawling and multifaceted; there is a surplus of culpability, a subtle narrative thread that "Spotlight" teases out in the final moments.

Those moments say something truthful about newspapers. So do scenes of Globe staffers manning the phones the day the story appears, prepared for an expected flood of complaints about bias.

That's how newspapers contribute to the actual memory of a city, rather than its selective memory, by pursuing and publishing stories people probably don't want to read.

As news consumption gives way to clicks and filters and feeds, that form of news-gathering may itself be a memory.

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