La La Land sees Emma Stone's struggling actress Mia and Ryan Gosling's struggling jazz musician Sebastian meet in the bizarre hurly burly of LA and start a relationship based on their mutual support of each others dreams. Mia works in a coffee shop on a studio lot, which is the closest she's gotten to being on a movie set so far. She goes to audition after audition giving her all and being treated to blank faces in return. Sebastian is a jazz obsessive, he's obsessed with bringing real jazz back and keeping it alive, his dream to open a jazz club where they can play what music he wants.
Straight from the opening scene where the drivers on the freeway in LA break the monotony of the morning commute by breaking out into a performance of the extraordinarily catchy Another Day of Sun, you understand the joy of La La Land. Chazelle has already shown in just two films the spectacular energy he is able to infuse in his films and he really lays down a marker in this opening piece. It also helps that Chazelle has a background in music and knows how to film it, this gives a really dynamic passion to the sequences featuring jazz music. The films shows off old school sensibilities, Mia and Sebastian's song on the hill is a really charming song and dance number that instills the dynamic with a classic screwball romance.
Emma Stone really shows off the full extent of her talent here, her dancing is good, her singing even more so, but its the audition scenes where she excels most. In one audition she delivers a remarkable performance of someone delivering a remarkable audition, which makes the rejection seem even more cruel. Her big Audition song is a marked highlight of all the songs, a song where you genuinely feel someone heart and soul being poured out. The problem with Mia's character however is the manner in which the film undermines her through her relationship with Sebastian. Ryan Gosling is a very talented actor, his dancing is solid, his singing less so, his performance draws most of the films laughs and he wears a suit very well, but there's one inescapable fact, Sebastian is a complete and utter tool. He's a music snob, a self involved ass-hat who thinks he's charming. His existence begins to undermine Mia's character, she only seems to succeed in the film because Sebastian told her she could, if it wasn't for this guy's existence then she'd give up, it's such a shame that Emma Stone has to have her performance weakened by this.
There's fun to be had in the film with Chazelle's gentle ribbing of Hollywood. You can't help but wonder that if Whiplash comes from his experiences as a jazz drummer then La La Land must come from his own experiences of getting to Hollywood. At one point we hear from a screenwriter who has "a lot of buzz around him" because he's a "world builder", the young writers main idea, Goldilocks and the three bears told from the point of view of the bears, "it could be a franchise". It's moments like this where you wonder if that's something Chazelle has genuinely heard.
Character problems aside, you would have to be completely soulless not be caught up in the sheer charm of La La Land. It loses it's way in the middle a bit, but when the songs are so catchy and the set pieces so energetic, it's hard not to feel the films magic.
(High 4 Stars)
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