It is not so simple. Everything started by exposing film which can be quiet different of what we have in digital. You can expose "correctly" or underexpose or overexpose. After that you made corrections during the developing stage - this is the basic of Zone System. There are probably more than hundred black and white films, each with different characteristic, one of the specific characteristic was Characteristic Curve - it was a curve like we have today in PS. That curve was affected by type of developer, mostly basic 7 - 9 types and all together several hundreds of different developers which gave slightly different results. So working with curve is basic for black and white photography, curves was measured and affected by processing all the time, for example process that we like to call solarization was generating very strange curves. Than there was in game temperature of developer, concentration, age or the fact how many films you develop in it before specific development, the way you agitate during developing and so on.
Than paper - they also have characteristic curve, there are 6 basic grades and many grades in between, there was also 3 different basic type of papers by composition, and many more in between. There was techniques like split grade printing, also printing different parts of pictures with different grades. There was more than a hundred papers on market, each was different by characteristic curve. Than there was more than a hundred different developer which will gave different results. So the curve was everything in black and white. It controls contrast, globally or locally. Exposing the paper just control what the name suggest - exposure.
At the end you had really endless possibilities, therefore emulating the look of film is really just the matter of you choice due to the fact that there is no specific look of film.
There was less variations in color photography, but again many of them. So if you like looks of film, why you just don't use the film after all?