With La La Land, writer and director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) has produced another almost impossibly good movie that punches well above its weight.

Those who scoffed and stalled before seeing a story about a drum school last year were, once they relented, floored by a searing and brutal journey of sacrifice for art’s sake that had my vote for best picture of 2015. Similarly, anyone who pooh-poohs La La Land just because it’s a nostalgia-ridden Hollywoodland musical is missing out on, simply put, one of the top movies of this entire wild year.

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling (a pair with famously delightful chemistry) team up in a love story set in modern day Los Angeles but deep-steeped in nostalgia. (And this is way beyond the tired hipster “old-school” nostalgia of small-batch bourbon, vinyl LPs, vintage jeans, and lumberjack beards. This is a full-bore visual homage to classic musicals, jazz, and outfits, but wrapped around a smart and modern-ish story.)

For those still skittish, I will offer this breadcrumb: La La Land isn’t quite as much a musical as you might think. Sure, there are a few songs and dances (and, with the possible exception of the opening scene, they’re all beautifully done) but on the whole it plays much more like a regular movie. Fear not.

Stone plays Mia, a barista working on a big studio backlot who dreams (of course) of being a star; Gosling is Sebastian, a struggling jazz musician (and all around natty dresser) who hopes one day to open his own club. Mia and Seb meet in a traffic jam (LA-style; he blares his horn and she flips him off) and re-meet several times, bumping into one another around LA. Finally — after reveling in an extended will-they-or-won’t-they duet worthy of Hollywood’s Golden Age — they hit it off and fall in love.

It’s here that things get interesting. La La Land shares much with the fabulous Don’t Think Twice in its cool, frank exploration of the price of success; it also echoes the self-aware naivete of Mulholland Drive, basically every Woody Allen ode-to-a-city ever, and even such diverse fare as Frozen and (dare I say) The Family Man. Mia and Seb navigate a beautiful and resonant Los Angeles, every shot a hymn to the rich history of this city in film. Gorgeous backdrops of purple sunsets and crisp streetlamps pair with chirping cell phones, traffic jams, and music.

Emma Stone is fabulous here and she’s a shoo-in for some hardware come spring; Gosling is his usual charming self, wry and loving and gliding around silkily and nailing his dance routines. He sings mercifully little (but he does try so hard). The supporting cast is generally distant, though John Legend steps in to remind us what skillful male singers sound like (sorry Gosling), and Chazelle’s old pal J.K. Simmons earns a great, late laugh.

Chazelle is a Harvard film guy and it shows. As Gosling’s Sebastian bemoans the decline and fall of jazz, Chazelle is in turn of course lamenting the slow death of old-fashioned film. The solution — cautiously endorsed by Seb and Chazelle both, but undeniably pragmatic — is to modernize, to innovate, make it new, add some synth, make it play with the fresh and the hip and the young. The message? You’ll never recapture the greatness of the past by simply serving it up again, as it was then. You have to remix.

And that’s exactly what Chazelle does with La La Land. This isn’t a rehash or a recycled musical. This is more. The central story is a great one and beautifully told, at once bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and inspiring and sweet, while at the same time candid and heartbreaking and sublime and very beautiful.

If you’re not especially excited to go see a musical, just trust me and take this one on spec.

Haus Verdict: Breathing new life into a flatlined genre, La La Land could have scored a solid base hit and left it at that. But it swings for the fences, again and again, and by the time the credits roll has become something truly transcendent. This is what a night at the movies should be.

See what another third thinks: CLGJr’s review.

La La Land opens everywhere December 25.

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