Movie review: joyful 'La La Land' will put a song in your heart

'La La Land', the delectable new film from Damien Chazelle - winner of seven Golden Globes, recipient of 11 Bafta nominations, and the expected winner of the 89th Academy Award for Best Picture - is a musical.

And not just any old musical, but the twirling, soaring kind that was last in style in the 1960s heyday of Jacques Demy, when Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac swished down sun-drenched boulevards in sorbet-coloured minidresses.

Chazelle captures that spirit - which was fondly nostalgic even in Demy's day - and releases it into the wilds of present-day Los Angeles like he's returning a long-absent species to its natural habitat.

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Old Hollywood is where the movie musical first flourished, after all - and though its golden age may be long gone, the film has faith that a boy, a girl, a bench and a plum-coloured sunrise are still capable of working their magic.

The boy is Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a passionate jazz pianist with a half-formed but wholehearted ambition to open a club of his own and defend his favourite music from extinction.

And the girl is Mia (Emma Stone), a gifted aspiring actress who flits between fruitless auditions and a coffee-shop till on the Warner Bros studio lot. All that each of them needs is an opportunity. What they find is each other.

Whether or not the latter of those things can make up for the absence of the former is the big question on La La Land's mind, and the answer isn't as glib as you might expect.

Behind the film's nimble comedy and exuberant musical set-pieces beats a complex, crisply written romance, the power of which creeps up on you slowly then strikes in the film's second half, in which Sebastian and Mia's ambitions and relationship become increasingly tricky to reconcile.

But everyone in La La Land is wrestling with ambition. In the opening number, attractive young hopefuls spill out of their cars in a traffic jam, and sing about the city's daunting show-business heritage, and the grit it takes to even try to measure up to it.

Stone and Gosling - who have made a convincing screen couple twice before, in Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad - leave you more than persuaded that some serious clicking has taken place. Both stars are so attuned to each other's pace and flow that their repartee seems to tumble out, perfectly formed. Perhaps hardest of all, they make it look easy. Gosling may be the first actor in film history to somehow pull off looking self-deprecatingly handsome.

WATCH the trailer for La La Land

Stone, meanwhile, has one of those audition scenes in which nobody present realises how good she is but us - and it only works because she really is that good, magicking up emotion in seconds in a setting that's about as inherently dramatic as a stationery cupboard.

Whether La La Land's ending plays as sad or happy comes down to how much faith you have in happy endings: but either way, it sends you from the cinema with tears in your eyes, a song in your heart, and a clear six inches of thin air between the soles of your shoes and the pavement. - The Daily Telegraph

sub_head_start WHAT OTHERS SAY sub_head_end

• For a film that starts with a slightly campy musical number that could alienate viewers just as easily as charm them, this romance sure makes the leap to greatness quickly. — S Jhoanna Robledo, Common Sense Media

• A feel-good triumph and a darkly honest exploration of the quest for fame and romance in Los Angeles. — Rich Cline, Contactmusic.com

• I have yet to meet someone who's watched it and come out in a bad mood. — Jim Slotek, Toronto Sun

• This article was first published in The Times.