‘La La Land’ looks great, but musical numbers fall flat

Unfortunately, he isn’t really a singer and neither is Stone — a pasteurized, student council president version of Lindsay Lohan. She continues to seem grindingly cute, rather than actually lovable or even disarming. Writer-director Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash”) cleverly uses the City of Angels itself as a fantasyland, making a whimsical set out of Griffith Observatory and opening the film with a traffic jam in which drivers step out of their cars and dance on the freeway.

Still, that traffic-jam-party idea had far more kinetic energy when it was done here, on West 46th Street, in “Fame” — and Stone’s levitation isn’t as adorable as Goldie Hawn’s in “Everyone Says I Love You.”

The latter film featured standards that people have loved for decades; the former had a soundtrack that sold millions. With a few exceptions, “La La Land” features anodyne pop numbers. A cheesy cover band that we’re supposed to laugh at because it plays A-ha and Flock of Seagulls actually provides the best music in the entire movie, along with a scene in which Gosling’s Charlie Parker-worshiping character sells out and plays in an R&B band people actually like — which is framed as an act of self-betrayal.

Neither a brilliant comedy like “Singin’ in the Rain” nor imbued with tragic grandeur like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” “La La Land” deserves credit for high spirits even if it’s essentially a collection of glamorous throwback music videos for so-so songs.

It saves its best for last: In a long audition sequence certain to earn Stone an Oscar nomination, , followed by a wordless epilogue fantasy reminiscent of the dream ballet in “An American in Paris,” the film finally gets some emotional heft. The ending isn’t quite Catherine Deneuve walking in the snow at that gas station in Cherbourg, but it’s reasonably close.