This book offers a new look at the development, style, and reception of the 2016 film musical La La Land. Drawing on extensive personal interviews with the film's creators, it explores La La Land's aesthetic approach to the film musical genre, its simultaneous engagement with and subversion of the classic Hollywood musical's stylistic and narrative expectations, the film's depiction of jazz, and the reception of the film.

Hannah Lewis is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a musicologist who specializes in music for film and visual media, American popular music traditions, musical theater, early twentieth-century French music, and American avant-garde and experimental music. She is the author of French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema and co-editor (with Jim Buhler) of Voicing the Cinema: Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack.

Introduction
1. The Development of a ?Realist Musical?: The Chazelle-Hurwitz Collaboration
2. Nostalgia, Homage, and Bittersweet Endings: La La Land and the Classic Film Musical
3. Modernizing a Classic Form: Realism and Virtuosic Performance
4. La La Land and Jazz
5. Reception
Conclusion: La La Land's Legacy
Bibliography
index