La La Land (2016) review

La La Land is a musical in which nobody sings about what they actually feel. Every number is a performance, a fantasy, or a deflection, and the film's devastating final sequence reveals what the songs were covering up.

The Musical as Misdirection

The film opens with a freeway number in which dozens of drivers abandon their cars to dance, and it immediately establishes that the musical sequences are not realistic. They are the characters' interior lives rendered as spectacle, and the film is careful to distinguish between numbers that are fantasies (the planetarium, the finale) and numbers that are performances (Seb's band, Mia's audition).

Chazelle's insight is that a musical can be about the impossibility of the musical's own promise. The songs in La La Land are beautiful and they express longing, but they do not solve anything. The film's climax is a fantasy of what could have been, and its power depends entirely on the audience knowing it is not real.

Read more about romance cinema in our Romance genre hub, explore the work of Damien Chazelle in our directors section, or see where this film lands in best films of the 2010s.

Formal Craft

The film was shot in CinemaScope by Linus Sandgren, and the decision to use widescreen, long takes, and practical lighting creates a visual grammar closer to 1950s MGM than to contemporary filmmaking. The opening number was shot on a closed freeway ramp over two days with a single continuous take, and the technical ambition is genuine rather than nostalgic.

Justin Hurwitz's score is the film's other pillar. The songs are written to be sung by actors rather than vocalists, which is a deliberate choice — Gosling and Stone are not trained singers, and the imperfections are part of the film's argument about aspiration. 'City of Stars' and 'Audition (The Fools Who Dream)' are the two best original film songs of the decade.

Gosling, Stone, and the Relationship

Emma Stone won Best Actress for this and the performance is the film's strongest element. Mia's arc is the one with genuine movement — from auditions that fail to an audition that succeeds — and Stone plays the accumulated exhaustion of a decade of rejection without ever asking for sympathy. Her final audition monologue is the emotional peak of the film.

Gosling's Seb is more problematic. He is a character defined by his purism, and the film is never quite sure whether his refusal to compromise is admirable or self-indulgent. The 'jazz is dying' speech is the film's most criticised element, largely because it is delivered with the assumption that the audience shares Seb's premise. Gosling plays it well, but the character's arc is thinner than Mia's.

The Ending and the Debate

The final sequence — a five-minute fantasy of what the relationship could have been, followed by a look between two people who have both got what they wanted — is the reason the film is discussed rather than merely enjoyed. It refuses the genre's central promise and replaces it with something more adult: that success and love can be mutually exclusive, and that choosing one is not a failure.

Some viewers find that ending honest and others find it a betrayal of the genre's contract. Both reactions are reasonable, and the disagreement is the film's most interesting quality. A musical that ends with a couple not ending up together is not unprecedented, but it is rare enough to feel like a statement, and Chazelle commits to it completely.

Themes and ideas

• Ambition vs. love
• The cost of success
• Performance and authenticity
• What could have been