Why is La La Land so sad

The shine is coming off of La La Land. The box-office smash and owner of a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations premiered to rapturous reviews at film festivals last fall, but in the weeks that followed, and as the film screened for more and more critics, a backlash began to grow. Representatives of various marginalized communities – women, African Americans, and jazz lovers – emerged to take the film down a peg. What ensued was an all-out war (albeit one waged mostly on Twitter) between the film’s fans and its detractors. While it might seem odd that a movie as guileless and nostalgic as La La Land – which draws as its inspiration from the classic musicals Singin’ in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – has provoked such ire, this is the pop cultural world we live in. Every piece of art is now politicized and parsed for its problematic elements. These complaints may take some of the joy out of a film intended only to entertain, but they also reveal vital perspectives that have been hidden for too long from our white-male dominated discourse.

Most of these criticisms come with an admission that La La Landis, on its surface, great entertainment. The snappy songs, brightly colored clothes and the virtuosic film-making are diverting enough that the film’s persistence in entertaining you is emotionally moving. For the millions of Americans who are depressed and anxious about the state of the nation, La La Landis a trifle that seems more substantial because of our desperate need for distraction.

Not all of us, however, are in the mood for trifles. The first complaints came from the hepcats. The film’s lead character, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), is a young, white jazz lover who dreams of opening his own club. He’s a traditionalist who harbors dreams of saving jazz by returning it to its roots. Later, in order to show girlfriend Mia (Emma Stone) that he can make a living at his craft, he sells out and agrees to perform in a jazz fusion band led by his friend Keith, played by John Legend.

Jazz fans see this as a false depiction of important debates within the jazz community. At Vulture, Seve Chambers accuses writer-director Damien Chazelle of “ideological snobbery”, noting that most real jazz fans actually agree with Keith that traditionalism is not the best way to revive the genre. “Today’s artists have realized that letting go of these conservative notions is the best way to ‘save jazz’,” he writes. “[But] Chazelle stacks the deck against him: Keith turns out to use a laughably ’80s sound that’s meant to seem completely disconnected from his jazz roots.”

The traditionalist argument is even more problematic when you consider the character Chazelle has created to voice that perspective. “If you’re gonna make a film about an artist staying true to the roots of jazz against the odds and against modern reinventions of the genre,” writes Ira Madison III at MTV News, “you’d think that artist would be black.” Jazz is a uniquely black American genre, and many of its most famous artists, such as John Coltrane and Charles Mingus, were heavily involved in the civil rights movement. It’s noteworthy, then, that the jazz musician Sebastian most reveres is Charlie Parker, who died in 1955 before that movement really got started.

None of this is to suggest that the film is exactly racist. Sebastian romanticizes Parker simply because he lived and died before jazz started to change for the first time. But it’s impossible to separate jazz from black history, and it’s downright foolish to do so in a film by, for and largely about white people. It’s especially dangerous right now. Geoff Nelson at Paste Magazine links the film’s traditionalism and the satisfaction derived from its nostalgia to the Trump campaign’s backwards-looking ethos: “There lies a profound irony in liberal white folks heading to La La Land to repair after a political season overflowing with the nostalgia of white supremacy.”

Still, it’s not quite right to say that the film endorses Sebastian’s purity test. After all, Keith makes a pretty good argument at one point that Sebastian’s adherence to the purity of jazz is counter-productive and anathema to the boundary-busting spirit of jazz itself. To its great credit, the film refuses to pick sides. Instead it lingers in the question, allowing Sebastian to ultimately achieve all of his professional dreams – he gets his club in the end – while questioning what he sacrificed to get it. Such an ambiguous ending should quash any attempts at certitude. Unfortunately, that’s not how our culture works these days.

Over the past few years, there has been a concerted effort among pop culture critics to elevate the voices of the marginalized, both in works of art themselves and among the critical community. As necessary as this effort is, it can make it more difficult for a film to transcend racial and gender boundaries because there is always a group that can claim that the film ignores them. Notably, La La Land was also criticized for its lack of gay characters on the basis that, well, there are a lot of gay people in Los Angeles but none in the film. Whether you think this is fair or not, it’s going to continue to be an issue until Hollywood more generally solves its problem of inequality in gender, race and sexual identity.

To wit, critics have indeed found something troubling in La La Land’s gender politics. Emma Stone’s performance is getting all the awards buzz (she has already won a Golden Globe and a SAG award), but Morgan Leigh Davis notes in LA Review of Books that she is little more than a bystander in her own story. “Sebastian’s drive and dedication are more textured than Mia’s, and it is his melody that recurs through the film to denote particularly important moments in their relationship. He is the author of their relationship: he comes to ask her out at work; he introduces her to jazz; he takes her to see Rebel Without a Cause for research (despite the fact that she is the actor and supposed cinephile).” Davis also notes that Chazelle’s filmography is full of scenes in which men teach jazz to women. As Sebastian watches a live jazz performance with Mia, he explains to her: “It’s conflict, it’s compromise, and it’s very, very exciting.” He might as well be teaching her about life, which is essentially what he does over the course of the film. In a vacuum, this doesn’t hurt the film’s effectiveness, but when you consider the fact that no best picture winner has had a female protagonist since 2003 (Chicago), it’s easy to understand why the issue is getting this kind of attention.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any of these complaints getting much traction if La La Land were not such an enormous hit. Had it been met with indifference by critics and audiences, my hunch is that nobody would care so much about its racial or gender politics. Jazz fans might even be championing it, if only to get more attention for their forgotten art. But being the front-runner puts a target on your back, especially this year. After racial tension rose to a fever pitch in 2016, Hollywood gave us three beautiful, critically acclaimed films about black characters, Moonlight, Fences and Hidden Figures. Some may ask, shouldn’t Hollywood recognize one of them, instead of a movie about a white guy who wants to save jazz?

Indeed, that might just happen. Hidden Figures pulled off an upset at the SAG Awards two weeks ago, earning the prize for best ensemble, which is sometimes seen a precursor for best picture (La La Land, weirdly, was not nominated). When the story of the year in cinema is written, we may say that La La Land peaked too early, or that it was the right film at the wrong time, or that its other, less political criticisms – the story is a little thin, the characters don’t particularly sing or dance very well, and it may be just too self-indulgent for its own good – were exposed after its shine finally wore off. For now, we will have to wait to see if Hollywood is more interested in looking forward or looking back.

• This article was amended on Monday 6 February 2017. We mistakenly claimed that Chicago was the only best picture nominee since 2003 that had a female protagonist rather than the only best picture winner. This has been corrected.

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