La La Land is a 2016 American musical romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle. The film stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a jazz pianist trying to succeed and an actress working hard to achieve her goals. They meet and fall in love while chasing their dreams in Los Angeles. Other actors in the film include John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, and J. K. Simmons.

Damien Chazelle, who enjoyed musicals while playing drums, first thought of making the film while studying at Harvard University with Justin Hurwitz. After moving to Los Angeles in 2010, Chazelle wrote the script but could not find a studio willing to fund the film without changes to his vision. Following the success of his 2014 film Whiplash, the project was supported by Summit Entertainment. Originally, Miles Teller and Emma Watson were considered for the lead roles, but they left the project. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were then cast. Filming took place in Los Angeles from August to September 2015. The film’s music was composed by Justin Hurwitz, who also wrote the songs with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Mandy Moore choreographed the dance scenes.

The film premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2016, and was released in the United States on December 9, 2016, by Lionsgate. It became a major success, earning $447 million worldwide. Critics praised the film, especially Chazelle’s direction and writing, the performances of Gosling and Stone, the music, songs, visual style, costumes, and set designs. The film received many awards, including seven at the 74th Golden Globe Awards and five at the 70th British Academy Film Awards. It was also nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning six, including Best Director (Chazelle) and Best Actress (Stone). Although it did not win Best Picture (which went to Moonlight), it became the most-nominated film at the Oscars to lose that category until 2026. At 32 years old, Chazelle became the youngest person to win Best Director. The film is considered one of the best from the 2010s and 21st century and one of the greatest musicals ever made. As of February 2023, a stage musical version of the film is being planned.

Plot

While stuck in Los Angeles traffic ("Another Day of Sun"), Sebastian "Seb" Wilder has a moment of anger directed at aspiring actress Amelia "Mia" Dolan. After a difficult day at work, Mia's next audition goes poorly because the casting director takes a phone call during an emotional scene. That night, her roommates take her to a fancy party in the Hollywood Hills, promising it might help her career ("Someone in the Crowd"). After her car is towed, she walks home feeling disappointed.

During a gig at a restaurant, Seb starts playing jazz music without following the rules ("Mia & Sebastian's Theme") despite the owner's warning to only play traditional Christmas pieces. Mia hears him playing as she passes by. Inspired, she enters the restaurant and sees Seb being fired for his disobedience. Mia tries to compliment him as he leaves, but he ignores her. Months later, she meets Seb at a party where he plays in a 1980s pop cover band. Mia asks Seb to play "I Ran" for her. After the gig, they walk to their cars and, though they feel a connection, they both regret spending the night together ("A Lovely Night").

Seb visits Mia's workplace, and she shows him around the Warner Bros. backlot, where she works as a barista, while sharing her love for acting. He takes her to a jazz club and explains his passion for jazz and his dream of opening his own club. Seb invites Mia to a screening of Rebel Without a Cause, and she agrees, forgetting a date with her boyfriend. Bored by the date, she rushes to the theater and finds Seb as the film begins. When the screening is interrupted by a projector problem, Seb and Mia spend the rest of the evening together, ending with a romantic visit to the Griffith Observatory.

After more failed auditions, Mia decides, with Seb's support, to write a one-woman play. Seb starts performing regularly at a jazz club, and the two eventually move in together ("City of Stars"). A former bandmate of Seb invites him to be the keyboardist in a new jazz fusion band, which would give him a steady income. Though unhappy with the band's pop style, Seb agrees after hearing Mia try to convince her mother that he is working on his career. The band becomes successful, but Mia knows their music is not the kind Seb wants to perform ("Start a Fire").

During the band's first tour, Seb and Mia argue: she accuses him of giving up on his dreams, while he says she liked him more when he was unsuccessful because it made her feel better about herself. Two weeks later, Seb misses Mia's play due to a forgotten photoshoot. The play fails, with very few people attending, and Mia overhears people making negative comments about her performance. Unable to forgive him for missing her play and their previous argument, Mia returns to her hometown of Boulder City, Nevada.

Seb receives a call from a famous casting director who attended Mia's play, inviting her to audition for an upcoming film. Knowing this could be her big break, he drives to Boulder City quickly and finds her house because he remembered she lived across the street from the library, where she fell in love with acting. Seb convinces her to attend, and she reluctantly agrees.

During the audition the next day, Mia is asked to tell a story. She responds by singing about how her aunt, a former stage actress who eventually died from alcoholism, inspired her to chase her dreams ("Audition (The Fools Who Dream)"). Confident the audition was successful, Seb encourages Mia to focus on acting. The two then realize they will always love each other, no matter what happens to their relationship.

Five years later, Mia is living a happy life as a successful actress and is married to a different man, with whom she has a daughter. That night, the couple stumbles upon a jazz bar. Recognizing the logo she once designed, Mia realizes Seb has opened his own jazz club. Seb notices Mia in the crowd and begins to play their love theme on the piano. The two imagine what their happy life together might have been ("Epilogue") if their relationship and careers had both thrived, then exchange silent smiles and go their separate ways.

Production

As a drummer, Chazelle has a preference for musical films. He wrote the screenplay for La La Land in 2010, when the film industry seemed difficult to enter for him. His idea was to take the old musical style but connect it to real life, where things do not always go as planned. He also wanted to honor creative people who move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. He created the film while he was a student at Harvard University with his classmate Justin Hurwitz. The two explored the idea in their senior thesis through a low-budget musical about a Boston jazz musician, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Chazelle was inspired by the tradition of 1920s "city symphony" films, such as Manhatta (1921) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which celebrated cities. After graduating, both moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and continued writing the script, but made changes, such as changing the location from Boston to Los Angeles.

Instead of comparing Los Angeles to cities like Paris or San Francisco, he focused on what makes the city unique: traffic, sprawl, and skylines. The style and tone of the film were influenced by Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, especially the latter, which had more dance and jazz elements. The film also includes visual references to Hollywood classics such as Broadway Melody of 1940, Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and An American in Paris. Chazelle said about An American in Paris: "That’s a movie we borrowed from. It shows how bold some old musicals were." La La Land shares some character development and themes with Chazelle’s earlier musical work, Whiplash. Chazelle said:

He explained that both films reflect his own experiences as a filmmaker working his way up in Hollywood. La La Land was inspired by his experience of moving from the East Coast with ideas about what Los Angeles would be like, "that it was all just strip malls and freeways."

Chazelle could not make the film for years because no studio was willing to fund an original musical with no familiar songs. It is also a jazz musical, which The Hollywood Reporter called an "extinct genre." He believed that since he and Hurwitz were unknown at the time, it might have made financiers unsure about the project’s success. Gosling’s character, Sebastian, believes that past jazz is better than modern jazz. According to an article by Anthony Carew, Chazelle created this character trait to reflect "[his] own relationship with the past and with jazz, too." Chazelle found producers through friends who introduced him to Fred Berger and Jordan Horowitz. With these producers, the script was sent to Focus Features with a budget of about $1 million. The studio asked for changes: the male lead was to be a rock musician instead of a jazz pianist, the opening scene was altered, and the bittersweet ending was removed. Chazelle abandoned the project and moved on.

Chazelle later wrote Whiplash, which was easier to sell and a safer investment. After Whiplash was well received by critics when it premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Chazelle continued working on La La Land. A year later, when Whiplash earned five Oscar nominations at the 87th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made nearly $50 million worldwide from a $3.3 million budget, Chazelle and his project began to attract studio interest.

Five years after Chazelle wrote the script, Summit Entertainment and Black Label Media, along with producer Marc Platt, agreed to invest in La La Land and distribute it. They were impressed by the success of Whiplash. Lionsgate’s Patrick Wachsberger, who had worked on the Step Up franchise, encouraged Chazelle to increase the film’s budget because he believed high-quality musicals require more money.

Miles Teller and Emma Watson were originally cast in the lead roles. Watson left to work on Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017), while Teller left due to contract negotiations. Gosling turned down the Beast role in Beauty and the Beast to join La La Land. Chazelle decided to make his characters older and more experienced, rather than young newcomers.

Emma Stone plays Mia, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles. Stone loved musicals after seeing Les Misérables at age eight. She said "bursting into song has always been a dream of mine," and her favorite film is the 1931 Charlie Chaplin comedy City Lights. She studied pom dancing as a child and took a year of ballet. She moved to Hollywood with her mother at fifteen to pursue a career and struggled to get auditions during her first year. When she did get auditions, she was often turned away after singing or saying one line. Stone used her own experiences for her character, and some were added to the film.

She met Chazelle in 2014 while performing in Cabaret on Broadway. Chazelle and Hurwitz saw her perform on a night when she had a cold. She met with Chazelle at Brooklyn Diner in New York City, where he explained his vision for the film. Stone gained confidence from performing in Cabaret to handle the film’s demands. To prepare for her role, she watched musicals that inspired Chazelle, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and films by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. She accepted the role because Chazelle was passionate about the project.

Ryan Gosling plays Sebastian, a jazz pianist. Like Stone, Gosling used his own experiences as an aspiring artist. One incident was used for Mia’s character. Gosling was performing a crying scene in an audition when the casting director took a phone call during it, talking about lunch plans while he was acting. Chazelle met Gosling when he was about to start filming The Big Short. In addition to Gosling and Teller, Michael B. Jordan was considered for Sebastian’s role.

Chazelle cast Gosling and Stone immediately after Summit bought the film. He said the pair "feel like the closest thing we have now to an old Hollywood couple," like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and Myrna Loy and William Powell. The film was their third collaboration, following Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) and Gangster Squad (2013). Ch

Release

La La Land had its first showing at the Venice Film Festival as the opening film on August 31, 2016. The film was also shown at the Telluride Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival starting September 12, 2016, the BFI London Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival in late October 2016, the Virginia Film Festival at the University of Virginia on November 6, 2016, and the AFI Fest on November 15, 2016.

The film was originally planned to be released on July 15, 2016. However, in March 2016, it was announced that the film would have a limited release beginning December 2, 2016, followed by a wider release on December 16, 2016. The director, Chazelle, said the change was made because he believed the original release date was not suitable for the film and wanted to start with a slow rollout at early fall film festivals. The limited release was later moved to December 9, 2016, with the wide release still planned for December 16, 2016. Lionsgate showed the film in five theaters on December 9, 2016, and expanded it to about 200 theaters on December 16, 2016. The film became available in all theaters nationwide on December 25, 2016, and was fully released in all theaters on January 6, 2017. A version of the film for IMAX theaters was released one week later.

La La Land was released in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2017. The film was shown in the Netherlands on December 22, 2016, and in Australia on December 26, 2016. Other countries planned to release the film starting in mid-January 2017.

Lionsgate released La La Land as a digital version on April 11, 2017, and as a Blu-ray, Ultra HD Blu-ray, and DVD on April 25, 2017.

Reception

La La Land earned $151.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $353.5 million in other countries, for a total of $504.6 million worldwide. The film’s production cost $30 million. Deadline Hollywood reported that the film’s net profit was $68.25 million after all costs and earnings were considered, making it one of the most profitable films of 2016. This is Ryan Gosling’s second highest-grossing film, surpassed in 2023 by Barbie.

La La Land first opened in five theaters in Los Angeles and New York City on December 9. It earned $881,107 in its opening weekend, averaging $176,221 per theater, the highest average of the year. In its second week, the film expanded to 200 theaters and earned $4.1 million, ranking seventh at the box office. This was a 366% increase from the previous week, with an average of $20,510 per theater. The next week, the film expanded to 734 theaters and earned $5.8 million over the weekend, including $4 million on Christmas Day and $9.2 million over four days. It finished eighth at the box office. On January 6, 2017, the film expanded to 1,515 theaters and earned $10 million over the weekend, finishing fifth at the box office. In its sixth week, the film earned $14.5 million (a total of $16.9 million over four days for Martin Luther King Jr. Day), finishing second at the box office behind Hidden Figures. After receiving 14 Oscar nominations, the film expanded to 3,136 theaters on January 27, 2017, earning $12.1 million, a 43% increase from the previous week. During the weekend of February 24–26, the film earned $4.6 million, the same amount as the previous weekend. The following week, after winning six Oscars, the film earned $3 million.

La La Land received widespread praise from critics. Reviews highlighted the director’s work, the screenplay, cinematography, music, and the performances of Gosling and Stone. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 91% based on 470 reviews, with an average score of 8.7/10. Metacritic gave it a score of 94 out of 100, indicating "universal acclaim." It was the third- and sixth-highest rated film of 2016 on each site. Audience polls gave the film an "A−" average on a scale from A+ to F, and 81% of viewers said they would recommend it.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film four stars, calling it a "hot miracle" and praising its musical numbers. He named it his favorite movie of the year. Michael Phillips of Chicago Tribune praised the film’s opening scene and Stone’s performance, saying she was "reason enough to see La La Land." A.O. Scott of The New York Times called it a "fizzy fantasy" and "a hard-headed fable." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it five stars, calling it a "sun-drenched musical masterpiece." Filmmakers such as Jonathan Demme, Christopher Nolan, and others also praised the film.

La La Land faced some criticism for its portrayal of race and jazz. Some critics argued that Gosling’s character was seen as a "white savior" for trying to save a traditionally Black musical genre. Others said the film’s middle section was weak or its performances were unimpressive. However, the film continued to be celebrated as a modern classic. It was included in lists such as "the greatest romantic movies of all time" by CBC Radio and "the best film of the 2010s" by Helena Trauger of The Beacon. In 2022, Time Out ranked it number 79 on its list of the "100 Best Films of the 21st Century," calling it "a film with a signature all of its own." MovieWeb ranked it number 2 on its list of "Best Movie Musicals of the 21st Century So Far" and number 1 on its list of "Best Modern Movies Shot on Film." In 2023, it was ranked number 3 on "The 15 Greatest Movies About Jazz" and number 1 on "Best Modern Movies Shot on Film."

Stage adaptations

On February 7, 2023, it was announced that the film will be turned into a Broadway musical by Platt and Lionsgate. Hurwitz, Pasek & Paul will write more songs for the musical. Bartlett Sher will direct the show, which is based on a book written by Ayad Akhtar and Matthew Decker.

A separate stage show called So Long Boulder City was created in 2017 by comedians Jimmy Fowlie and Jordan Black. The show is a full-length parody of Mia Dolan's one-woman performance from the movie. It includes Fowlie performing in drag as Mia. The show first opened in Los Angeles and later played at the SubCulture Off-Broadway theater in New York City.