Ultimately, La La Land is a hat-trick.albeit a very accomplished hat-trick. If that doesn't speak to many of today's workaday Americans, then the musical is not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

It's a dessert and a floor wax.er, rather, it's nostalgic, romantic, and also terminally cynical all at once while dancing backward in high heels. Instead, the entire song-and-dance - we're taking the film as a whole - knowingly keeps it from tripping over its own feet into a brink called cornball. This could very easily have gotten so on-the-nose schmaltzy that the scene required an animated Disney sidekick. Take for instance a date night rendezvous shot in the Griffith Observatory, which literally sees the leads taking flight and dancing among the stars. While some great musicals like All that Jazz get downright bleak, La La Land softshoes into the dark without every fully losing its color and buoyancy. Indeed, La La Land lovingly tips its hat to such entertainment industry-set musicals as Singin' in the Rain and New York, New York but also charts a millennial-appropriate melancholic course all its own. In this PG-13-rated musical, a pianist (Ryan Gosling) and an actress (Emma Stone) fall in love while attempting to reconcile their aspirations for the future amid navigating their divergent careers in Los Angeles. Singing and dancing its way into the hearts, minds, and ears of even those who think that Chicago was a complete waste of time, elegant, enchanting, edgy and elegiac tune-up La La Land often looks like an homage to Golden Age H'Wood but sports enough lovestruck spark and - alternately - jaded spunk to qualify it as a true modern-day genre original.

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