La La Land is a 2016 American musical romantic comedy drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle. It stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a struggling jazz pianist and an aspiring actress who meet and fall in love while pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles. The supporting cast includes John Legend, Rosemarie DeWitt, Finn Wittrock, and J. K. Simmons.
Having been fond of musicals during his time as a drummer, Chazelle first conceptualized the film alongside Justin Hurwitz while attending Harvard University together. After moving to Los Angeles in 2010, Chazelle penned the script but did not find a studio willing to finance the production without changes to his design. After the success of his film Whiplash (2014), the project was picked up by Summit Entertainment. Miles Teller and Emma Watson were originally in talks to star, but after both dropped out, Gosling and Stone were cast. Filming took place in Los Angeles between August and September 2015, with the film's score composed by Hurwitz, who also wrote the film's songs with lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul and the dance choreography by Mandy Moore.
La La Land premiered at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2016, and was released theatrically in the United States on December 9, by Lionsgate. The film emerged as a major commercial success, grossing $447 million worldwide during its initial run, and received widespread acclaim from critics, particularly for Chazelle's direction and screenplay, the performances of Gosling and Stone, the score, musical numbers, cinematography, visual style, costumes and production design. It went on to receive numerous accolades, including winning a record seven awards at the 74th Golden Globe Awards and received eleven nominations at the 70th British Academy Film Awards, winning five, including Best Film. The film also received a record-tying fourteen nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, winning in six categories including Best Director and Best Actress (Stone). Its loss in the Best Picture category (to Moonlight) made it the most-nominated film at the Oscars to lose Best Picture, until Sinners loss (to One Battle After Another) in 2026. At age 32, Chazelle became the youngest winner of Best Director. It has since been regarded as one of the best films of the 2010s and the 21st century, and as one of the best musical films of all time. , a stage musical adaptation is in the works.
Plot
While stuck in Los Angeles traffic ("Another Day of Sun"), jazz pianist Sebastian "Seb" Wilder has a moment of road rage directed at aspiring actress Amelia "Mia" Dolan. After a hard day at work, Mia's next audition goes awry because the casting director takes a phone call during an emotional scene. That night, her roommates take her to a lavish party in the Hollywood Hills, promising her that it could jump-start her career ("Someone in the Crowd"). After her car is towed, she walks home in disappointment.
During a gig at a restaurant, Seb slips into jazz improvisation despite the owner's warning to only play traditional Christmas pieces. Mia hears him playing as she passes by. Moved, she enters the restaurant and observes Seb being fired for his disobedience. Mia attempts to compliment him as he storms out, but he roughly shoulders past her. Months later, she runs into Seb at a party where he plays in a 1980s pop cover band. Mia requests that Seb play "I Ran" for her. After the gig, they walk to their cars and lament wasting the night on each other ("A Lovely Night"), despite their clear chemistry.
Seb arrives at the cafe where Mia works, and she shows him around the Warner Bros. backlot while expressing her passion for movies and acting. He takes her to a jazz club, where he shares his passion for jazz and his dream to open his own jazz club. Seb invites Mia to a screening of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and she accepts. Mia later remembers a conflicting dinner date with her boyfriend, and initially forgoes the movie to go on the original date. However, finding herself bored with the date, she rushes to the theater and finds Seb just as the film begins. When the screening is interrupted by a projector malfunction, Seb and Mia spend the rest of the evening together with a romantic visit to the Griffith Observatory, where they share a kiss.
After more failed auditions, Mia decides, with Seb's encouragement, to write a one-woman play. Seb begins to perform regularly at a jazz club, and the two of them eventually move in together ("City of Stars"). Keith, a former bandmate of Seb's, invites him to be the keyboardist in a new jazz pop band, which will give him a steady income. Although dismayed by the band's pop style, Seb signs on after hearing Mia trying to convince her mother that he is working on his career. The band finds success, but Mia knows their music is not the type of music Seb wants to perform ("Start a Fire").
During the band's first tour, Seb and Mia argue. She accuses him of abandoning his dreams, while he insists that she liked him more when he was unsuccessful because it made her feel better about herself. Two weeks later, Seb misses Mia's play because of a photoshoot he had forgotten about. The play fails, very few people attend, and Mia overhears dismissive comments about her performance. Unable to forgive Seb for missing her play and for their previous argument, Mia breaks up with Seb and returns to her hometown of Boulder City, Nevada.
Seb receives a call from a prominent casting director who attended Mia's play, inviting her to audition for an upcoming film. Knowing that this could be her big break, he drives in a hurry to Boulder City to tell Mia. He successfully finds her house by recalling that she lived across the street from the library, where she first fell in love with acting. Seb persuades her to attend, and she reluctantly agrees to go.
During the audition the next day, Mia is asked to tell a story. In response, she sings about how her aunt, a one-time stage actress who eventually died from alcoholism, inspired her to chase her dreams ("Audition (The Fools Who Dream)"). Confident the audition was a success, Seb encourages Mia to devote herself to acting. The two recognize that they will always love each other despite what may come for their relationship.
Five years later, Mia is living a happy life as a successful actress and married to a different man, with whom she has a daughter. That night, the couple stumble upon a jazz bar. Recognizing the logo she had once designed, Mia realizes that Seb has opened his own jazz club. Seb notices Mia in the crowd so plays their love theme on the piano. The two imagine what their happy life together would have been ("Epilogue") had their relationship thrived along with their careers, then acknowledge each other with a silent exchange of smiles.
Cast
Production Pre-production
As a drummer, Damien Chazelle is a big fan of musical films. He wrote the screenplay for La La Land in 2010, when the film industry seemed out of reach for him. His idea was "to take the old musical but ground it in real life where things don't always exactly work out," and to salute creative people who move to Los Angeles to chase their dreams. He conceived the film when he was a student at Harvard University with his classmate Justin Hurwitz. The two explored the concept in their senior thesis through a low-budget musical about a Boston jazz musician, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. Chazelle was moved by the tradition of 1920s "city symphony" films, such as Manhatta (1921) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929), that paid tribute to cities. After graduating, both moved to Los Angeles in 2010 and continued writing the script, but made a few modifications, such as altering the location to Los Angeles instead of Boston.
Rather than trying to match L.A. to the charms of Paris or San Francisco, he focused on the qualities that make the city distinctive: the traffic, the sprawl, and the skylines. The style and tone of the film were inspired by Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, especially the latter, which was more dance and jazz-oriented. The film also makes visual allusions to Hollywood classics such as Broadway Melody of 1940, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, and An American in Paris. About An American in Paris, Chazelle commented: "That's a movie that we just pillaged. It's an awesome example of how daring some of those old musicals really were." It shares some character development and themes with Chazelle's previous musical work, Whiplash; Chazelle said: "They're both about the struggle of being an artist and reconciling your dreams with the need to be human. La La Land is just much less angry about it."
He said that both films reflect his own experiences as a filmmaker working his way up the Hollywood ladder. La La Land in particular is inspired by his experience of moving from the East Coast with preconceived notions of what L.A. would be like, "that it was all just strip malls and freeways".
Chazelle was unable to produce the film for years as no studio was willing to finance an original contemporary 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 that time, it might have made financiers dubious about the project's potential. Ryan Gosling's character Sebastian holds a view of the jazz of the past being superior. According to an article by Anthony Carew, Chazelle wrote this character trait as a reflection of "[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 the two producers on board, the script went to Focus Features at a budget of around $1 million. The studio demanded alterations: the male lead was asked to be changed from a jazz pianist to a rock musician, the complicated opening number had to be altered, and the story's bittersweet ending needed to be dropped. Chazelle refused and put the project on hold.
Chazelle later wrote Whiplash, which was an easier concept to sell and a less risky investment. After Whiplash was well received by critics upon its premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in January, Chazelle continued his efforts to bring La La Land to the big screen. A year later, when Whiplash earned five Oscar nominations at the 87th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and grossed nearly $50 million worldwide off a $3.3 million production budget, Chazelle and his project began to attract attention from studios.
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 had been impressed by the critical and commercial success of Whiplash. Lionsgate's Patrick Wachsberger, who previously had worked on the Step Up franchise, pushed Chazelle to increase the film's budget since he felt high-quality musicals could not be made cheaply.
Casting Miles Teller and Emma Watson were originally slated to star in the leading roles. Watson dropped out to honor her commitments to Disney's live-action Beauty and the Beast remake (2017), while Teller exited via long contract negotiations. Coincidentally, Gosling turned down the Beast role in Beauty and the Beast in favor of La La Land. Chazelle subsequently decided to make his characters somewhat older, with experience in struggling to make their dreams, rather than younger newcomers just arriving in Los Angeles.