La La Land
2016 film directed by Damien Chazelle

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.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “La La Land” as 2016 film directed by Damien Chazelle. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2016 film directed by Damien Chazelle. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20856802. 6 of 9 selected statements include explicit references; 8 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2010, 2014 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “La La Land” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.