Review: La La Land (12A)

Presented in the style of an old-school MGM musical – with a dash of Umbrellas of Cherbourg-style Nouvelle Vague cool – Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to Whiplash has already collected multiple accolades and is now the bookies’ favourite to clean up at the Oscars next month.

It’s not hard to see the appeal – or indeed admire the ambition of Chazelle, who’s still in his early 30s (La La Land is only his third movie). Yet for those not immediately swept up in this love story about an aspiring actress (played by Emma Stone) and a wannabe jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling), its charms aren’t always immediately apparent and it can irritate as much as elate.

Kicking off with a ten-minute song-and-dance opus on a traffic-jammed bridge in the middle of the Los Angeles freeway, it sets its sunny and nostalgic tone from the off, expanding its shot-in-cinemascope frame to reveal the sort of choreography that, if not exactly on a par with the old movie musical masters, is at least a welcome step-up in proficiency from all those Mamma Mia!-inspired free-for-alls that have brought the musical into disrepute in recent years.

Still, it’s a bit of a litmus test and as the film starts running Stone’s character Mia and Gosling’s character Seb through rote professional setbacks in their efforts to follow their showbusiness dreams, it tends to overplay the cutesiness of its set-up with lots of self-referential gags about its own status as an unapologetically joyful heart-on-its-sleeve throwback to old Hollywood in an era of cynical franchise filmmaking. The thing is, it’s hard to think of a movie that wants to be loved more than La La Land and this becomes a little problematic.

Still, the film’s own original musical numbers are pretty decent and there’s a sweetness and melancholic edge to the way Gosling and Stone perform them. Both are rawer and less polished than professional Broadway hoofers, but that only enhances the genuine moments of film magic that Chazelle does conjure up when his stars’ chemistry breaks through all the artifice and the connection between the characters is undeniable.

Manchester by the Sea (15)