Damien Chazelle's original musical. Six Oscars, one infamous Best Picture mix-up, and an ending that arguments still haven't settled.
Mia is an aspiring actress working as a barista on the Warner Bros. lot. Sebastian is a struggling jazz pianist who plays the dinner shift at a chain restaurant. They meet, dislike each other, meet again, fall in love. He gets a steady gig in a smooth-jazz band that compromises his musical principles. She writes a one-woman play that fails. Both their careers turn — but apart from each other.
Years later they meet again, by accident, in a club Sebastian now owns. A five-minute imagined sequence plays out the life they didn't have. Then they nod at each other across the room, and the film ends. The audience leaves arguing about whether the ending is sad or right or both.
Original screen musicals — meaning original story, original songs, not adapted from a Broadway production — almost stopped being made in the 1970s. La La Land is one of the few major studio originals of the 21st century, and certainly the most commercially successful. The fact that Chazelle was able to finance it on the back of Whiplash's success is itself one of the more unusual industrial stories of the decade.
The film's craftsmanship is unmistakable. The opening 'Another Day of Sun' is a single-take freeway musical number that took two days to shoot on a closed-down interchange between the 105 and 110. Linus Sandgren's CinemaScope cinematography returns to a colour palette — sunset oranges, electric blues — that hasn't dominated Hollywood since the Vincente Minnelli musicals of the 1950s.
The final sequence of La La Land has been argued about since the film's release. Mia and Sebastian meet by accident at his club years after their break-up. As Sebastian begins to play their theme, the film cuts to a sequence imagining their alternate life — they stay together, they have a child, they're happy. Then the film cuts back. They nod. She leaves. The film ends.
The reading the film invites is not that Sebastian and Mia made a tragic mistake by breaking up. It's that the choices that led them to professional fulfilment were also choices that led them away from each other, and both halves are true at once. The film refuses to grant a 'right' answer. Chazelle has called the ending 'bittersweet' rather than tragic.
At the 2017 Academy Awards, La La Land was announced as Best Picture. Producer Jordan Horowitz began his speech. Two minutes in, the Academy realised the wrong envelope had been handed to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. The actual winner was Moonlight. Horowitz, on stage, gestured for the Moonlight team to come up.
The moment is now one of the most-replayed in Oscar history. It also, slightly unfairly, became the film's defining cultural memory. La La Land still won six Oscars that night, including Best Director (Chazelle, at 32 the youngest ever), Best Actress (Stone), and Best Original Score (Hurwitz).