A great movie, but not a true musical

Rating: 8/10 (25 January 2017)

To me, it was sold as a musical, but it was actually a movie with music in it. It indeed had a lot of performed songs, and it had the jazz; but that's not what a musical is supposed to be, not at all.
A musical is supposed to tell the story through the music itself, and in La La Land, the music itself didn't tell the story, which is what a musical does: it tells the story through the music.
I acknowledge that it's a great movie, but I felt cheated and it disappointed me because I wanted to watch a musical in the likes of Chicago, Dreamgirls and Hairspray.
I wanted to watch a movie that used the music as the means to tell the story.