Mia (Emma Stone) works in a Los Angeles coffee shop but really wants to work in theatre, as performer or writer.

Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) plays middle-of-the-road numbers on the piano in a middle-of-the-market restaurant but really wants to play stronger stuff and to compose.

Writer/director Damien Chazelle’s film is an intellectually-undemanding homage to the kind of musicals that MGM in particular and other studios in MGM’s wake churned out in the middle decades of last century. I mourn the demise of the genre that embraced  those wonderful escapist films. AM radio played numbers from them and I would sing along. Modern musicals delivering messages don’t really cut it for me. 

In a giant gridlock on one of those multi-lane freeways for which Los Angeles is infamous, “La La Land” begins with a vigorous song and dance number of awesome complexity, impressive performance skills, but no visible relationship with the story that Mia and Seb will tell once the traffic starts moving again.

Yep. It’s boy and girl meeting, performing the customary, perhaps even obligatory, routines – getting to know each other, falling in love, career collisions, relationship hazards and independent outcomes such as entertained us when moving image entertainments meant travel to a cinema or a drive-in there to consume junk food while watching FAQ movies and, in the case of young folk, testing the car’s suspension. 

While agreeable enough, the vocal numbers in “La La Land” are unlikely to top any charts and the feature dance numbers don’t get within a bull’s roar of work by, for example, Cyd Charisse or Ann Miller.  When Seb gets an offer to join a jazz group, the instrumental numbers work well. 

At all cinemas