La La Land review: Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's performances hit some very high notes

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is a wildly ambitious widescreen musical drama that, at its best, hits some very high notes indeed. It features exceptional performances from its two leads, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. The downside is that the film is uneven and has its moments of extreme kitsch and bathos.

In a way, Chazelle is on a hiding to nothing. The parade has long since gone by and it simply isn’t possible today to recreate the glories of the Hollywood studio system when movies like Singing in The Rain or An American in Paris were being turned out to order. There aren’t the same choreographers. The vaudeville system, from which many of the stars emerged, is dead.

This much is evident in the opening sequence of the film – a traffic jam on a sunny day in Los Angeles. Chazelle shoots this musical number in a single shot. The camerawork is frenetic and very showy, soaring and dipping around the cars, but the number itself feels strangely stilted and self-conscious.

Caught in the traffic jam, Mia (Stone), a struggling actress, and Sebastian (Gosling), a jazz musician, have their first encounter. He hoots at her. She gives him the finger.

The early scenes are steeped in nostalgia. Everywhere you look, there are reminders of Hollywood’s Golden Age: posters of Ingrid Bergman movies and murals featuring Charlie Chaplin and other stars. Mia works as a barista in a coffee shop on the Warner Bros lot not far from the sets where Casablanca was shot.

Sebastian is eking out a living as a pianist in a restaurant. In spite of their initial hostility to one another, they soon begin to date. Their courtship begins in earnest at a screening of Rebel Without A Cause. Sebastian, played with saturnine charisma by Gosling, has more than a hint of James Dean about him. They revisit some of the locations in which the movie was shot, most notably the planetarium. Chazelle throws in several song and dance sequences. Gosling and Stone are competent hoofers but they’re not exactly Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.

Where the film is most powerful is in its account of the lovers’ attempts to pursue their professional dreams. Both are rebuffed again and again. Mia attends endless auditions, most of which end in humiliation. Seb is a jazz purist who dreams of owning his own club but jazz itself is dying and he can’t get work unless he compromises.

La La Land unfolds over seasons and its style changes as it progresses. The references to the old days of Hollywood soon diminish and the film develops into a study of a relationship between two artists whose ambitions inevitably get in the way of their private lives.

The director has written of his admiration of the work of French director Jacques Demy, famous for his bittersweet musicals. At its best, though, the film seems closer to Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, with its depiction of the very tempestuous relationship between Robert De Niro’s saxophonist and Liza Minnelli’s singer. Alongside the escapist fantasy sequences (the two lovers dancing in the stars), there are moments here of real emotional intensity.

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As in his previous feature, the Oscar-winning Whiplash, Chazelle is trying to get under the skin of his characters and to show just what they have to sacrifice in their pursuit of artistic excellence. At times, it’s as if we are watching two different movies – an escapist musical fantasy and a far darker, earthier drama about a love affair beginning to sour. It’s to the credit of Stone and Gosling that they excel both in the comedic moments and in the more fraught and naturalistic scenes.

La La Land follows previous Oscar winners Gravity and Birdman in receiving its premiere as the opening film of the Venice Festival. Whether it will emulate their success remains to be seen but its two leads surely deserve some kind of recognition come awards season.

La La Land hits UK cinemas 13 January