The feel-good La La Land, director Damien Chazelle's prohibitive awards favorite, is a movie of mystery. Can Emma Stone sing? (She can.) Can Ryan Gosling sing and dance? (As a singer, he makes an OK dancer.) The real and lasting question rising from its smoggy, sunny success, however, is this one: Why don’t they make more musicals? Every week a pigeon flies in from “The Death of Cinema”-land with a horror story about

Damian Chazelle’s opening is simple, economical, bursting with information. In short: powerful. Andrew, the story’s teenaged hero, is practicing alone at night at the world’s top music school. Enter Fletcher, the sole decision-maker on who gets to be a great jazz musician (a goal that is clearly and painfully central to our hero’s life). From the first scene, we know who our hero is, what his goal is, what he must do to get it