La La Land should have been a disaster. Every American movie musical it resembles has been. The plot of La La Land recalls Martin Scorsese’s tiresome New York, New York, released in 1977; both feature a principled and snobbish jazz musician who falls in love with an overeager novice performer. Its highly stylized use of Los Angeles recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s stylization of Las Vegas in the simultaneously overproduced and undercooked One from the Heart from 1981. Its use of non-singers and non-dancers as singing and dancing leads recalls Woody Allen’s 1996 Everyone Says I Love You, which proved to be a cringe-inducing embarrassment for almost everyone concerned.
Legends Scorsese, Coppola, and Allen sought to modernize and refresh the movie musical and, instead, laid eggs the size of the spaceships in Arrival. With La La Land, a 31-year-old whippersnapper named Damien Chazelle has done nearly everything right. Where La La Land‘s predecessors were leaden and obvious and as appetizing as fallen soufflés, Chazelle’s confection is light and airy. It’s fun and frolicsome and playful in a way few movies are these days. But it is far from insubstantial. Once it has completely earned your affection, La La Land makes startling use of what it has earned in an inspired, highly emotional extended finale that leaves you simultaneously stunned and transported.
Two hours before that finale, the movie begins in the midst of one of those horrendous midday Los Angeles traffic jams, in which an overpass turns into a parking lot. The camera pans down a row of frozen cars until it stops at a young woman behind the wheel in a yellow dress. Suddenly the woman begins to sing a cheerful samba that is accompanied by a somber lyric about the boyfriend she left at a Greyhound station. She emerges from her car, and then another driver joins in, and another, and in a single bravura shot the entire overpass and all the motionless cars are converted into an impromptu dance floor. The number is called “Another Day of Sun,” and the running joke of La La Land is that no matter the day, no matter the season, and no matter the condition of the souls and spirits of the characters, the sun is shining.
Two people aren’t dancing. One is a young actress named Mia (Emma Stone), who is distracted because she is running lines for her upcoming audition. The other is the driver behind her, Seb (Ryan Gosling), who is annoyed when the traffic finally eases and Mia’s car doesn’t move. He pulls alongside her, honking his horn, and the two flip each other the bird. When they eventually find each other again, they have no memory of this encounter, but we do, and we’re not sure whether we’ve seen a sweet version of a Hollywood meet-cute or a harbinger of ill tidings.
Mia is having no luck breaking through as an actress and works at a Starbucks on the Warner Brothers lot with a mean boss who has long since given up on her own ambitions. Seb is a struggling pianist probably a decade older than she. His dream of opening his own jazz club was dashed when he was conned out of his money by a shyster. His talent is undeniable but his fundamentalist commitment to classic bebop, and a combative passive-aggressive disposition hidden beneath a sweet smile, has left him all but unemployable.
Throughout the movie, the composer Justin Hurwitz takes the theme we first hear in “Another Day of Sun” and repurposes it in a series of numbers that, as in the best musicals, seem to emerge organically from the thoughts and feelings of the characters. A lovesick Seb walks on a pier and, under his breath, begins to sing words to the tune he calls “City of Stars.” On a search for their cars after a party, Mia and Seb sit on a bench below a streetlight in the Hollywood Hills and, suddenly, they’re soft-shoeing. In this, as in every scene they share, Stone and Gosling are nothing less than incandescent. They pull off something nearly impossible as they perform “A Lovely Night”—they embrace and even make fun of their own amateurism, enacting a production number in the manner of two movie-musical fans imitating Astaire and Charisse rather than making a foolish attempt to match the matchless pair that danced in the dark in The Band Wagon.
In the end, Chazelle isn’t trying to evoke The Band Wagon or the other great MGM musicals of the golden age. His movie is more in the spirit of Jacques Demy, the French director whose fully sung-through Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) features a swoony romance between two gorgeous teenagers that is tempered by Demy’s rueful and adult understanding of the questionable durability of teenage love. “I could never live without you,” the lovers sing to each other, as her mother watches from the side, sadly aware that life is probably going to prove them wrong. Chazelle’s Mia and Seb are not teenagers, and they are not challenged by the nature of growing up. Their love is endangered by the fact that they are, in the end, adults.
Damien Chazelle’s first major feature, Whiplash, was the best movie of 2014. With the release of this radically different and entirely transporting piece of work, Chazelle has delivered the most startling and impressive one-two punch as a writer and director in modern film history.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
