La La Land divides audiences because of its ending, which is exactly right. A film about dreams and compromise and the roads not taken should not end with everything working out. Damien Chazelle understood that. Some audiences did not forgive him. That is their loss.

Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress serving coffee to studio executives who walk past her. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a jazz purist playing pop standards in restaurants that demean him. They fall in love. They chase their dreams. The dreams pull them apart.

Chazelle shoots the film with deliberate artifice: painted sunsets, Technicolor primary colors, a camera that glides and soars without motivation. This is not Los Angeles as it is; it is Los Angeles as two dreamers see it, gilded by projection and hope.

Gosling and Stone’s chemistry is real and specific, two people who make each other better and cannot quite make each other enough. Their final sequence, the “what if” imagined life together, played without dialogue, is one of the great emotional sequences in recent musical cinema.

Stone won the Academy Award for Best Actress. La La Land is the film that made Chazelle an auteur. It is a real achievement.