La La Land Review

Chazelle opens on a gridlocked freeway with a hundred dancers and holds it in an apparent single take, which is both thesis and dare: this will be a real musical, with a real camera, moving. Linus Sandgren shot it on film in CinemaScope and lit Los Angeles as though it were a soundstage, the Griffith Observatory sequence floating the pair up into a painted sky. Justin Hurwitz's melodies do a great deal of structural work, especially the way the City of Stars theme keeps mutating to track the relationship's temperature.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are not great singers or dancers and the film knows it, which lends the numbers an amateur charm that suits the material and costs them polish. The screenplay is the weak leg: the jazz-purism argument is thin, John Legend exists mainly to voice an objection, and the dialogue between numbers is functional. Then the closing montage plays out the life they did not have, and the whole thing turns devastating in eight minutes.