Review: La La Land

La La Land (12A)

USA 2016  128 mins  Dir: Damien Chazelle  Cast: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, JK Simmons

Damien Chazelle follows his over-praised Whiplash with this awards-bound retro-fetish musical reuniting Crazy, Stupid, Love stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone for a slick, stylised romp that will be hoofing heaven for enthusiasts. In truth, however, behind the relentless hype there’s little here for those who’d sooner gnaw off a limb than sit through a musical, other than to admire the sheer exuberance and craft involved.

Chazelle sets out his stall with a suitably dazzling pre-credits single-shot attention grabber. On a gridlocked LA freeway, commuters abandon their cars one by one and break into a full-on Fame-style mass vehicular song and dance routine (mercifully without the ’80s hairdos) while Linus Sandren’s camera swoops and whip pans around them. It’s exhilarating stuff, magnificently choreographed and carefully colour-coded. We’re also introduced to the principals in this thin/timeless (delete according to prejudice) Hollywood underdog boy-meets-girl story, who take an instant initial dislike to one another. Pianist Sebastian (Gosling) is a jazz snob – is there any worse kind? – who dreams of opening his own club for fellow purists. Until then, however, he’s stuck playing Christmassy muzak to punters who ignore him in JK Simmons’ restaurant. Mia (Stone) is a waitress who aspires to become an actress, enduring a series of miserable auditions. It’s not hard to imagine a plausible version of this story in which she goes on the game and he becomes her junkie pimp, but, hey, this is romantic fantasy.

As a jazz buff himself, Chazelle certainly seems to take pleasure in making Sebastian suffer. The inevitable meet cute hook-up with Mia occurs after she’s amused to find him reduced to playing in a cheesy ’80s cover band (cue: George Michael gag) at a party. Later, he finds some measure of commercial success but no musical satisfaction contributing showy, jazzy keyboard flourishes to an authentically bland multi-racial soul/funk/pop act fronted by an old pal (a knowingly cast John Legend).

Chazelle also has great fun with all the toys in the vintage musical toolbox (spotlights, dissolves, iris fades, retina-scorching primary colours, etc), while his leads make an attractive couple who rise to the challenge of those big set-pieces – although to these untutored ears the songs are nowhere near as memorable as those of the classics to whose status La La Land so eagerly aspires. Rather too eagerly, in fact, with its self-conscious barrage of ’40s and ’50s references as somewhat lazy shorthand to position the couple as beacons of taste in a vulgar modern world, from the giant poster of Ingrid Bergman above Mia’s bed to a date at a screening of Rebel Without a Cause and Sebastian’s endless name-dropping (Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, the inevitable Charlie Parker).

Given a smaller and less showy role than in Whiplash, JK Simmons is such fun as the tetchy restaurant proprietor who’s exasperated by Sebastian’s pretensions (“I don’t want to hear the free jazz!”) that one yearns for more of him. Those who come to swoon, however, will love it when the romance literally takes flight in an imaginative sequence at the Griffith Observatory, which reminded this shameful reviewer of Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song routine in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. As art and love collide and matters take a turn for the bittersweet, Chazelle delivers his finest flourish in the last reel: an elegant, skilfully edited, triple-hanky ‘what if?’ reversal that could teach Boris Johnson a thing or two about having one’s cake and eating it.