When La La Land came out in 2016, nobody quite knew what to do with it. A full-blown Hollywood musical, shot in widescreen Technicolor, with tap dancing and a jazz club and two beautiful people falling in love against the Los Angeles skyline — it won six Oscars and broke something loose in audiences that had forgotten musicals could do that. Then came the think pieces. Then came the people who decided loving it was embarrassing. The backlash arrived so fast it practically lapped the film.
A decade out, neither the worship nor the dismissal quite fits. What La La Land actually is — what it has quietly become — is one of the more honest films about ambition and romantic love that Hollywood has produced in a long time. It just hid that honesty inside a lot of pretty colors.
The story is simple enough. Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress working a coffee shop on a studio lot, going to auditions, getting rejected. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz pianist with a purist’s chip on his shoulder, playing Christmas carols at a restaurant because no one will pay him to play what he actually loves. They fall into each other awkwardly, then completely. For a while, being together feels like the whole point. Then their careers start to move, and the relationship starts to cost them something, and they have to decide — separately, without a big confrontation scene — what they actually want more.
What the film understood, and what I think people missed in the moment, is that it was never really a love story. It was a story about what love does to ambition, and what ambition does to love, and how those two things are almost never fully compatible in the way we want them to be. Mia and Sebastian don’t fail because they stopped caring about each other. They succeed, in the end — both of them. That’s the thing that lingers.
The ending is where the film earns everything it spent the previous two hours setting up. Sebastian is playing his club — the one he always wanted, named after the chord she suggested — when she walks in with her husband. He sees her. She sees him. He plays the song, and the film gives us a long fantasy sequence: the life they didn’t choose, playing out in saturated color and choreographed joy. It’s gorgeous and it’s unbearable, and then it’s over, and they exchange a small smile across a crowded room and she leaves.
No speech. No reunion. No suggestion that the other life would have been better, exactly — only that it would have been different, and that different carries its own weight forever.
Most studio films don’t have the nerve to end that way, and I don’t think 2016 audiences quite knew what to do with it. We were trained to read the fantasy sequence as regret, as loss. But Chazelle is more careful than that. The film doesn’t tell you Sebastian and Mia made the wrong choice. It tells you that every real choice costs you something, and that the thing it costs you doesn’t go away. You just learn to carry it.
Watching it now, after a few more years of life, that lands differently. Most people who have loved someone and watched it change or end or quietly transform into something else will recognize that final scene in their bones. The smile across the room is exactly right. It says: I see you. I remember. I’m glad it happened. And I’m not coming back.
If you need a single scene to convince someone to watch it, send them the “A Lovely Night” sequence in Griffith Park. It comes early, before either character has admitted anything to the other. They’re on a hilltop at dusk, bickering lightly, and then almost by accident they start to dance. The city is spread out below them, the light going gold and then purple, and what Gosling and Stone do together looks simultaneously rehearsed and completely spontaneous. Nobody is declaring anything. The dance is doing all the talking. It runs about three minutes and it’s one of the most purely cinematic sequences of the last decade — the kind of thing that reminds you what movies can do that nothing else can. Chazelle shot it during the few minutes of magic hour each evening, which gave them roughly five takes before the light was gone. Take one was too bright. Take five was too dark. They had to nail it in between.
The opening sequence is a different kind of achievement. Chazelle shut down the ramp connecting the 110 and 105 freeways in South Los Angeles for two full days, 130 feet in the air, in 104-degree heat, with 30 dancers, 100 extras and at least 60 cars. The choreographer, Mandy Moore — not the singer, a different person entirely — spent six months preparing it and spent the actual shoot lying under one of the cars, calling out counts while dancers jumped across rooftops above her. The crew practiced the number on their own cars beforehand and destroyed most of them in the process. The scene appears to be one continuous six-minute take. It isn’t — it’s three shots stitched together with hidden cuts during whip-pans — but the longest single stretch runs nearly four minutes and was done in one take. On a freeway. In the sun. With a crane camera that kept swaying in the wind.
The film has real weaknesses. Gosling is a better physical performer than an emotional one here, and Sebastian’s jazz obsession is written with more reverence than the script really earns. The first act takes its time finding its footing. And the original songs, while charming, are not exactly the Great American Songbook.
None of that matters much against what the film gets right. Emma Stone gives one of the cleaner, less-praised performances of her career — Mia’s audition scene near the end, where she sings about her aunt and why she became an artist, is the kind of moment that justifies the entire two hours before it. Chazelle shoots Los Angeles like someone who loves it and knows exactly what it does to people. And the film’s central argument — that you can love something and still choose something else, and that doesn’t make the love less real — is one worth sitting with at any age.
La La Land is available to stream on Netflix and to rent on most major platforms. It runs 128 minutes and is rated PG. If you wrote it off or haven’t seen it since the year it came out, give it another shot. You’ve probably lived enough since then for it to hit harder.
