Very good, just a shade off great

Rating: 9/10 (15 May 2018)

Mia is a barista: she is also an actress with endless unsuccessful auditions, as well as being a would-be playwright. Sebastian is a piano bar pianist with aspirations for owning his own jazz club. They bump into each other on several occasions and a bond starts to form. But in Hollywood the path of love never runs smoothly, does it?
Written and directed by Damien (Whiplash) Chazelle, La La Land tells a well-travelled romantic tale of two ambitious but unsuccessful young people on the foothills of Mount Showbiz. La La Land, by the way, is an excellent title, being a musical reference, a Los Angeles reference, and of course La La Land also meaning "living in a fantasy world."
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have already demonstrated their on-screen chemistry, and this is happily maintained here. They sing well, if not strongly, and the dance routines are attractively presented, if not particularly demanding of accomplished dancers. And Gosling is clearly an able pianist, even if his on-screen fingerwork is not always completely synchronised with what we hear.
The film starts very promisingly with a musical number staged on a freeway overpass. There is a strong jazzy/big band feel to a song which moves from a single a capella vocal to fully orchestrated mass vocals (at which point the lyrics to what was a very pleasing song get lost in the mixing). There are several very effective set piece musical numbers: the freeway number, an evening song/dance looking over LA, and a song during an audition, were all standouts for me.
The musical contributions sag somewhat in the middle of the film. The start promises that this will be very much a traditional Hollywood musical, with dramatic beats told in, and punctuated by, song and dance, but we then tend to get musical performances rather than integrated songs. And there is an over-reliance on the main musical theme, the one which you will know if you have seen the trailer. This pops up all the way through the movie in a wide variety of different arrangements and orchestrations. I would have been happier to have heard a more varied range of melodies.
This sounds very negative, yet I very much enjoyed the movie. If you're not a fan of musicals then it's unlikely that this will convert you, but I found the chemistry of the two main players delightful, they both give good performances and perform well musically and terpsichoreally, and Chazelle directs with immense verve and imagination - just look at the camera movement and the unedited length of shots in some of the set-pieces! He must surely get a nomination for this year's best Director Oscar (which, of course, he went on to win).
And, despite the possibility of the ending not being what you may have wanted, the film remembers to be fun.