“La La Land” is a crowd-pleaser if ever there was one, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be part of the crowd. Damien Chazelle’s musical, consistently daring and occasionally sublime, does what the movies have all but forgotten how to do—sweep us up into a dream of love that’s enhanced in an urgent present by the mythic power of Hollywood’s past.
The lovers are Mia, an aspiring actress and practicing barista, and Sebastian, a struggling jazz pianist who is dedicated, however precariously, to helping keep jazz alive; they’re played, respectively and superlatively, by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. Both Mia and Seb are enchanted by the past. She works in a coffee shop on the Warner Brothers lot within sight of the movie-set window, she tells him, thatHumphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergmanlooked out of in “Casablanca.” He owns a piano stool that Hoagy Carmichael once sat on, and treats it like a shrine.
