Directed by Damien Chapelle. Reviewed by Paul Sorrell 

Widely hailed as a homage to the old-time Hollywood musical, La La Land diverges from the genre insofar as the plot is more than a vehicle for a string of song-and-dance routines. Focused on an attractive young couple based in Los Angeles — Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a struggling jazz pianist — the film charts the pair’s progress from testy sparring to a full-blown relationship, followed by professional success for both.

Despite this strong storyline — which itself draws heavily on genre conventions — the film has all the trimmings of the traditional movie musical including toe-tapping dance numbers, ravishing urban backdrops and the interweaving of realism and fantasy. At the film’s romantic high point, set in a planetarium, the couple are literally dancing with the stars.

Unsurprisingly, this is a young person’s film in many ways, not just because of its focus on romantic love, but in its exploration of the theme of finding one’s way in the world — here, carving out a path to success in the unforgiving world of Hollywood, the La La Land of the title. If there is a serious theme in the movie, it is the struggle to reconcile vocational aspirations with a functional personal life.

However, what the film shows us, wittingly or not, is that the determination to fight one’s way to the top requires — and produces — a superfluity of ego. Ultimately, this makes the two leads an unattractive pair. I don’t recall a single scene in which either offers help to another character (although both receive plenty of assistance from others to advance their own ambitions). Mia and Sebastian are both trapped in their own self-made bubbles.

In the final sequence, set in Sebastian’s brilliantly successful jazz club five years after the main action, Mia fantasises about how their lives would have turned out had things gone differently for them. But, in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to care about this privileged pair who had already achieved what most of us would consider perfect careers. After all, they had each fulfilled their ultimate professional dream, becoming wealthy and famous to boot.

If La La Land is a story about people fulfilling their dreams, it also shows what it has cost them. What I am still unsure about is whether this is the message that the director intended audiences to take home with them.

Published in Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 212 February 2017:27.