La La Land captures the soaring spirit of classic musicals and sets it in modern life's trappings

If you've only just heard about La La Land, you may be wondering what all the song and dance is about. But if you've been tracing its trajectory for a while, you'll know that song and dance is the whole idea.

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 Fran?oise Dorl??ac swished down sun-drenched boulevards in sorbet-coloured minidresses, trilling glistening jazz-pop numbers that imprint themselves on your heart in one go.

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. 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 in question 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.

Once you've waltzed through the stars - as do our lovers at the film's halfway point, in an unabashedly gorgeous gravity-defying fantasia - the only way is down.

But everyone in La La Land is wrestling with ambition. In the opening number - there really is no mistaking the film is a musical from the get-go - attractive young hopefuls spill out of their cars in an impregnable 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.

Their enthusiasm level borders, I suspect very deliberately, on manic, and the song's title - Another Day of Sun - is repeated over and over, like an insistently chipper knock-knock-knock on an agent's door that just won't open.

This happens to be the very jam Mia and Sebastian find themselves in. They first meet seconds after the song ends, in fact, although the interaction involves nothing more than a jabbed car horn and a raised middle finger, and doesn't prove memorable for either of them.

It takes a further two encounters for things to click, but Stone and Gosling - who've 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 just 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.

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.

It's true their singing and dancing won't trouble Fred and Ginger's legacy. But on a second viewing, I realised it's not supposed to: even at its most heightened, there's a spontaneity, even casualness, to the way La La Land carries itself that feels both moving and genuine.

Besides, the film can keep time when it needs to. In his previous feature, Whiplash, Chazelle and his editor Tom Cross showed a rare capacity for finding a scene's underlying rhythm and hitting every beat and grace note dead on - particularly useful, considering the film was a drama about a drumming prodigy.

If anything, their instincts have sharpened since. A sequence in which Mia and Sebastian hold hands at the cinema is a mini-masterclass in mounting romantic tension, while a pivotal conversation in Sebastian's apartment, bathed in neon-green Vertigo light, slips from cross-purposes to outright hostility so naturally you barely realise it's happening at all.

It's stuff like this that makes you realise Chazelle, who sickeningly turns 32 next week, isn't just an astute trend-spotter, or even setter, but the real creative deal - and that La LaLand, far from being mere pastiche, is fit to stand alongside the very cinematic landmarks it reveres.

The film's most brazen act of appropriation - an extravagant big finish in the style of An American in Paris's dream ballet, complete with painted sets that look good enough to nibble - takes the rapturous craft of those MGM productions, and marries it to something approaching the euphoric bittersweetness of Demy's 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Whether La La Land's ending plays as sad or happy comes down to how much faith you have in happy endings in the first place: 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.

About the film

La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle

Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, John Legend, Josh Pence, Finn Wittrock, JK Simmons. Cert 12A, 132 mins.