La La Land (12A)

five stars

Dir: Damien Chazelle

With: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, JK Simmons

Runtime: 128 minutes

JANUARY. It is cold, bleak, a long way from pay day and the four horsemen of the credit card apocalypse are coming your way. Frankly, that smelly stuff Santa brought just will not cut it when it comes to lifting your mood. Thank the lord of the song and dance movie, then, for La La Land.

Over the course of two hours, Damien Chazelle and his cast transport the viewer back to the golden age of musicals while still keeping their feet, minds, and sense of humour in the here and now. Knowingly cornball, unashamedly romantic, delightfully silly, La La Land is an ode to joy, with a little bit of heartbreak thrown in just because the filmmaker can. After watching La La Land you may reckon that they still don’t make the old-school MGM musicals like Singin in the Rain and Easter Parade like they used to, but Chazelle’s picture is a pretty wonderful approximation nevertheless.

The story concerns, what else, a couple of young folk with dreams of making it big in showbusiness. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz pianist; Mia (Emma Stone) an actress. When they first meet it is loathing at first sight – caught in an LA traffic jam, she fails to move on quickly enough for the impatient Seb. By chance, they meet again when she walks into a bar where he is playing Jingle Bells to pay the rent, all the while trying to sneak one of his own numbers past the irascible owner (JK Simmons, who won a best-supporting actor Oscar for Chazelle’s previous hit, Whiplash).

Seb and Mia will continue to meet, purely by chance of course, because chance is what La La Land is all about. Seb and Mia are taking a chance on their careers, on each other, on life working out the way they hope. Mia in particular is a bundle of hopes and doubts, going to audition after audition, each one more soul-destroying than the last. We hope she is like Debbie Reynolds’ character in Singin’ in the Rain, the plucky kid who lands the break she deserves, but we doubt her chances.

Chazelle, who writes and directs, divides Seb and Mia’s story into seasons, starting with winter, weaving in some terrific songs and dance numbers as he goes along. While the otherwise delightful Gosling, being a little too short in the pins, is not quite Fred Astaire, the red-haired Stone is pure Ginger, a ballet dancer with the groove of a belly dancer.

Throughout the picture, Chazelle gives nods to screen musicals past and the town from which they came, and there is a lot of fun to be had filmspotting. Here, lamp posts are for swinging around and dust is there to be kicked. This is more than some trip down cinematic memory lane, however, and the film is not a pastiche of musicals past. It is too knowing for that. From the dialogue to the slightly left-field humour, La La Land is unmistakably of today.

But like the best musicals of old, it doesn’t half zip along. The song and dance numbers keep things moving, but mostly, it’s the sheer enjoyment to be derived from watching two actors at the top of their game that makes the time fly by. Chazelle cannot get enough of Stone’s face, and no wonder. She is marvellously expressive, an actor capable of showing complex emotions in the most subtle of ways. And woman alive can she sing. There is not a duff song among the music by Justin Hurwitz, but her rendition of Audition (The Fools Who Dream) is a particular showstopper.

La La Land heads towards the Oscars with seven Golden Globes to its name, including best actor, actress, and director. Given Hollywood loves nothing more than love letters to itself – witness the five Oscars awarded to The Artist – expectations are high. Do not let the hype put you off, though. Old Hollywood knew genuine talent when it saw it, and that is precisely what is on show in Chazelle’s very modern musical.