Director Damien Chazelle's flashy, toe-tapping new musical La La Land opens on a 21st-century version of the Yellow Brick Road. We're pulled into a nightmarish traffic snarl at the intersection of LA's 105 freeway and the 110 flowing into downtown. We see a chorus line of motorists vaulting in and out of their vehicles. The scene, involving a hundred dancers spinning on a roadway a hundred feet in the air, is thrilling, signifying the scope of the young director's ambition and his ability to connect with our dreams, our fears, and a genre long thought dead and buried: the MGM-style musical, bursting into song and dance.
For all its bows to Hollywood history, La La Land is foremost the story of wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and dedicated piano man Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), both battling to survive in LA, famous for stamping out dreams, obliterating hearts and hopes. The third wheel in this motorized love story/musical jamboree is jazz musician John Legend, who appears as Sebastian's buddy and employer, band leader Keith. Early in the story, he challenges Sebastian's definition of jazz music. "How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you're such a traditionalist? You hold onto the past, but jazz is about the future."
Fans of Chazelle's feature Whiplash remember how the sadistic band leader Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) bullied an aspiring young drummer (Miles Teller) with homophobic language ("cocksucker"). Simmons returns in La La Land with a pungent walk-on as a supper-club manager who warns piano-player Sebastian to play only treacly Christmas music that patrons can easily ignore. The stubborn Sebastian breaks into a jazz riff.
Boss: "You're fired."
Sebastian: "It's Christmas."
"Yeah, I see the decorations. Good luck in the New Year."
Meanwhile, Mia has been battling her own creative wars. Attempting to finance her one-woman play, she does shifts serving overpriced coffee to annoying yuppies. Her off-time is spent in futile auditions for TV/film work. Confiding in Sebastian, with whom she has developed an on-again/off-again sexual thing, Mia expresses her fear that maybe she can't hack the big time.
Mia: "Maybe I'm not good enough! It's like a pipe dream."
Sebastian: "This is the dream! It's conflict and it's compromise, and it's very, very exciting! You could just write your own rules."
"What are you gonna do?"
"Have my own club. I'm calling it 'Chicken on a Stick.'"
La La Land, opening Friday, is an engaging tussle, an original vision and a wonderful reboot of the Golden Age of Tinseltown musicals. Gosling's crash-course piano training deserves far more than a passing grade, and Stone's work is Oscar buzz-worthy. Crucially, the pair's third big-screen outing together demonstrates the kind of chemistry that would have been a pick to click even back in Gene Kelly's day.
As a big fan of the real LA, I was pleased to see La La Land take advantage of some classic Southland locations: Angels Flight, Colorado Street Bridge, Pasadena, Grand Central Market and Watts Tower. For Oscar-pool fans, La La Land should provide a bevy of behind-the-camera picks to clinch an office-Xmas-party win: Linus Sandgren for Best Cinematography, Tom Cross for Editing, and Justin Hurwitz for his melodic score. The soundtrack makes a festive stocking-stuffer.