I like Russell Crowe. If he is in a movie, I’m likely to see it. Or at least seriously consider it.

His current release is “State of Play” in which he plays a not-quite-believable newspaper reporter behaving in not-quite-ethical ways in and around a metropolitan newspaper.

As a thriller with the generic “military-industrial-complex-threatens-democracy” trappings, it’s a middling movie. Not good but not bad. Some tension, some chases but a plot that gets unnecessarily complicated. (I saw the movie 48 hours ago, and I absolutely could not recap the twists to you.)

I would recommend it, however, for the chunks of it filmed inside an actual newspaper, in this case the Washington Post. Because the energy and activity that the filmmaker would have you believe goes on inside what the movie calls the “Washington Globe” is a fairly accurate depiction what it was like to be inside the newsroom of a newspaper — and not very long ago.

But I fear that depiction already is hopelessly out of date.

The Crowe character is a veteran police reporter of the sort that was common, just the other day. But after the Newspaper Crash of 2008-09, I wonder how many guys like Crowe’s Cal McAffrey still exist. Quirky, mouthy, apparently self-assigned, no doubt highly paid (by journalism standards), with sources throughout the city and the trust (if not quite admiration) of the cops.

And I wonder how many newsrooms in this country are still as busy as the Washington Globe’s is made out to be. A few? One or two?

Just a few years ago, that newsroom could have been any one of hundreds of newsrooms in this country. But since then, with all the layoffs and cutbacks and shrinkage … for a newsroom of 2009 to be accurately depicted it would have lots of empty desks, a few reporters sitting around talking about the next round of layoffs and a sense of distraction from actually putting out a paper.

Thus, this could be a sort of historical record for newspapers, the last major Hollywood production of what a functioning newsroom looked like. Because the look will take you back. The news meetings. The banter. The reporters cajoling sources on the phone. The mid-level editor badgering a reporter, the editor in chief framing what a story should look like. Just the energy in the room. That all existed, not long ago. But I believe it already is lost to history. (Aside, perhaps, from the New York Times and the Washington Post.)

Thus, to watch the parts of the movie filmed inside the newsroom take on a sort of “life flashing before me” theme for former print journos. Yes, that’s what it looked like. The paper-strewn desks, the random bumper stickers and stories stuck to the walls, the slightly seedy reporting crew … people who seem to be complaining but actually are having a great time.

At the end of the movie, after a completely unbelievable chain of events (press is held for four hours, Russell Crowe writes a story that, apparently, is not edited and goes directly to press) we are shown the production side of what most newspapers looked like, say, 10 years ago. A velox coming out of a Log-E machine and going to camera. The negative being turned into a plate. The plates being put onto the press. A shot of a roll of newsprint being manuevered into place. The slow start of the printing process. The web flying at high speed. A conveyor belt taking folded newspapers away from the press. The papers being stacked into piles and bundled, and loaded into a truck.

That was how we lived, for 20-30 years. And is wrenching to watch. Because that world already is gone.

What makes this movie perhaps unique/distinct is that it may be the last major production to suggest “this is how newspapers come together” and mean “right now.”

Presumably, the script was written and most scenes shot before the bottom fell out of the industry, and any “contemporary” movie in the future will reflect that. And future depitctions of “old-time newspapering” will be as readily recognizable as history as, say, the remake of “The Front Page” looked, in 1974, or “All the President’s Men” from 1976 or even “The Paper”, from 1994.

“State of Play” already is a time capsule for American newspapering history.  As such, it tugs at the emotions of those of us who gave big chunks of our lives to that industry. And watching it — I should warn all former ink-stained wretches — might make you a little verklempt.