You’ ll leave with a tear in your eye and a song in your heart

recatingly handsome.

Stone, meanwhile, has one of those audition scenes in which nobody present realises how good she is but us — and it only works because she really is that good, magicking up emotion in seconds in a setting that’s about as inherently dramatic as a stationery cupboard.

It’s true their singing and dancing won’t trouble Fred and Ginger’s legacy. But on a second viewing, I realised it’s not supposed to: even at its most heightened, there’s a spontaneity, even casualness, to the way La La Land carries itself that feels both moving and genuine.

Besides, the film can keep time when it needs to. In his previous feature, Whiplash, Chazelle and his editor Tom Cross showed a rare capacity for finding a scene’s underlying rhythm and hitting every beat and grace note dead on — particularly useful, considering the film was a drama about a drumming prodigy.

If anything, their instincts have sharpened since. A sequence in which Mia and Sebastian hold hands at the cinema is a mini-masterclass in mounting romantic tension, while a pivotal conversation in Sebastian’s apartment, bathed in neon-green Vertigo light, slips from cross-purposes to outright hostility so naturally you barely realise it’s happening at all.

It’s stuff like this that makes you realise Chazelle, who sickeningly About the film

Director: Damien Chazelle Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, John Legend, Josh Pence, Finn Wittrock, JK Simmons. Cert 12A, 132 mins.

turns 32 next week, isn’t just an astute trend-spotter, or even setter, but the real creative deal — and that La LaLand, far from being mere pastiche, is fit to stand alongside the very cinematic landmarks it reveres.

The film’s most brazen act of appropriation — an extravagant big finish in the style of An American in Paris’s dream ballet, complete with painted sets that look good enough to nibble — takes the rapturous craft of those MGM productions, and marries it to something approaching the euphoric bittersweetness of Demy’s 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Whether La La Land’s ending plays as sad or happy comes down to how much faith you have in happy endings in the first place: but either way, it sends you from the cinema with tears in your eyes, a song in your heart, and a clear six inches of thin air between the soles of your shoes and the pavement.