In ‘Plainclothes,’ Russell Tovey and Tom Blyth play lovers on opposite sides of the law

In 2016, aspiring writer-director Carmen Emmi came across a Los Angeles Times article about undercover cops who would arrest gay men on charges of lewd conduct in public bathrooms — a controversial tactic criticized as a form of entrapment. Around that time, Emmi, then a film student at the University of Southern California, had just come out and his brother was in the process of becoming a police officer. Emmi channeled those experiences into his feature directorial debut, “Plainclothes,” which arrives in theaters Friday. Set in Emmi’s native Syracuse, New York, in the 1990s, the independent film fo