Modern Classics: ‘La La Land’ and the Limits of Musical Nostalgia

“How are you going to be a revolutionary
if you’re such a traditionalist?”

Nostalgia is a double-edged sword, and films like La La Land are the perfect illustration of that contradiction. A beautiful homage to the Golden Age Hollywood musical, Damien Chazelle’s film is also a story that constantly undermines itself, a movie at war with its own narrative logic. As the line quoted above suggests—thrown in the protagonist’s face by one of his friends—this is the story of someone who believes that the past was better, and that the only dignified way to endure a disappointing present is to take refuge in yesterday: in old movies, in “real” jazz. For him, being revolutionary means going back to the 1950s. Everything that came after is, by definition, second-rate.

The story La La Land tells is as old and as simple as it gets: boy meets girl, they fall in love, sadness follows, and, as Argentine filmmaker Leonardo Favio once put it, a few other things happen along the way. From the very beginning, it’s clear that Chazelle has the talent and ingenuity to stage spectacular musical numbers. In fact, the opening sequence set on a traffic-clogged freeway is so extraordinary that the film never quite recovers from it, spending the next two hours chasing its shadow. There are other memorable (if smaller-scale) musical and choreographic moments that conjure a certain classical magic, largely thanks to Emma Stone’s charm and talent, and, to a lesser extent, Ryan Gosling’s (forgive me, his fans, but he’s an actor who has never fully convinced me). Still, that first number is both overwhelming and unsurpassable. A true showstopper.

Sebastian is a jazz musician who wants to play his own music and dreams of opening a jazz club in a venue that was once a temple of the genre but has since become a “samba and tapas” bar. For now, though, he has no choice but to play Christmas tunes there, and the moment he even hints at something more jazz-oriented, he’s fired on the spot. Mia, meanwhile, is an aspiring actress working at a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. lot, unable to land a role despite her obvious talent and grace. (The scene she performs in her first audition is so striking that one can only conclude the casting directors must be complete idiots.) But that’s Hollywood for you, and Mia’s only option is to circulate through parties full of rich people, celebrities, and wannabes who are, predictably, either vapid, pretentious, or both.

Of course, Sebastian and Mia are better than everyone else, and it’s only a matter of time before they meet. After crossing paths a couple of times and nearly mistreating each other, they finally connect outside a party she’s bored at and he’s playing at to pay the bills, performing in an ’80s cover band dressed in era-appropriate outfits. For Chazelle, clearly, playing A-ha or A Flock of Seagulls is just as pathetic as eating tapas while listening to samba. Soon they step out into the street and really connect, leading to another of the film’s great scenes: a smaller musical number set in the Hollywood Hills, charming in its simplicity and beauty. Consistent with his purist approach (respectable, perhaps, but purism nonetheless), Chazelle stages these numbers in long takes, ostensibly to prove that his actors are really singing and dancing—even though the vocals were recorded long ago and the long takes themselves hide a few tricks. Still, as pieces of staging, all the musical and choreographic sequences are a delight. My issues with the film lie elsewhere.

At first, Sebastian is a hardline jazz purist who urges Mia to stop auditioning for bad TV shows (because television is, of course, bad) and to write her own one-woman play (because one-person shows are inherently noble and worthwhile), a project she struggles mightily to bring to fruition. But after overhearing a phone conversation between Mia and her father, in which she mentions that Sebastian doesn’t have a steady job, he decides to “grow up” and accepts an offer from a former musical partner who is now successful, touring and releasing albums with a soft-jazz—or pop-jazz—band, which Sebastian experiences as something close to divine punishment. The music disgusts him so much—and he’s such a real jazz musician—that he plays his solos with one hand while keeping the other in his pocket. Even worse, the audience—those “idiots” who pack stadiums—enthusiastically applauds this garbage. Still, Sebastian makes the sacrifice to be a good prospect for Mia, even though she never asked him to.

At this point, a SPOILER WARNING is in order. Anyone who has already seen the film, or doesn’t mind knowing what happens, can read on. Those who prefer not to should skip the next two paragraphs. The dramatic conflicts that drive the couple apart are as confusing as they are insubstantial. A temporary separation—she has to shoot a movie, he has to go on tour—shouldn’t, at least in principle, be an insurmountable problem for people in the entertainment industry. If it were, no relationship in that world would ever survive. And while it’s true that many don’t, here the film treats it as an immediate, fatal obstacle, rather than as something that might develop into a problem over time.

Near the end, Chazelle opts to retell the entire story in a kind of “what if” fantasy: what if everything had gone right, and both of them had succeeded professionally while staying together? What becomes clear is that there really aren’t many differences, that they could easily have remained a couple, since the only real factor separating them seems to be physical distance. One can’t help but imagine that two people with the passion they share—when they dance at the Griffith Observatory planetarium after failing to watch Rebel Without a Cause, they look as deeply in love as most of us have ever been—might have fought a bit harder to preserve that bond. Here, however, the screenwriters decide it simply isn’t worth the effort.

SPOILERS OVER. What ultimately becomes clear is that Chazelle is a very talented filmmaker with far stronger ideas about staging than about storytelling, character, or narrative logic. His white jazz musicians—noble guardians of a supposedly dying culture—who patiently mansplain to women what jazz really is (she thinks jazz means Kenny G, a joke that was already tired in 1997) become increasingly hard to stomach. Here, as in Whiplash, the female character ultimately functions as an inconvenience, something that gets in the way of following the muse of Charlie Parker and company. Because for a jazz musician, according to this worldview, the first, last, and only thing that matters is jazz. Women come and go; Art Tatum remains.

Which brings us to another of the film’s problems: its nostalgia for classic Hollywood musicals—and for the slightly more avant-garde versions made by Jacques Demy in the 1960s (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and especially The Young Girls of Rochefort, whose opening number La La Land clearly echoes and expands)—does not need to be grounded in contempt for everything that came afterward. Classic cinema may well be unsurpassable, and jazz too, according to Chazelle’s logic, but celebrating them doesn’t require dismissing everything else.

La La Land could have been a great musical without inventing “enemies” where none necessarily exist—a generous, inclusive, celebratory musical, which is exactly what the brilliant opening scene promises: a joyful collision of races, styles, and cultures on a freeway, where every idiosyncrasy and taste is respected. But Chazelle can’t quite bring himself to be fully celebratory. Somewhere along the line, he needs to draw boundaries, to play bouncer at an exclusive nightclub: “You’re in. You’re out.” That impulse extends all the way to denying the film a truly happy ending. Following the same logic, the movie can be magical—music and dance can lift you off the ground—but life will always trip you up when you least expect it. And if that doesn’t happen naturally, well, that’s what screenwriters are for.

Which is a shame, because the film has everything it needs to be extraordinary. The music and songs work (even if what Sebastian composes isn’t exactly the pure jazz he claims to worship), and if the genuinely celebratory pop spirit of many of those numbers had permeated the entire film, we might be talking about a masterpiece. La La Land offers a potentially unbeatable combination: strong choreography, excellent production design, inspired staging of musical numbers, and the magical Emma Stone—who, as always, does everything right—in the lead role. What ultimately holds it back is a writer-director who, at some point, feels compelled to divide the world into the righteous and the sinners, undermining much of the democratic, popular pleasure that once defined the great classic Hollywood musicals.