There's a moment in Damien Chazelle's La La Land in which Sebastian Wilder (Ryan Gosling) strolls out along the Hermosa Pier by dusk and sings what may be the film's signature number, "City of Stars." The fact that the jazz purist Wilder shows up in Hermosa Beach, just as he and his struggling actress paramour Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) magically pop up all over the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, is a bit of geographic chicanery one will readily enough grant the filmmaker. This clearly is the stuff of fantasy. The film is called La La Land after all (significantly, it's also more of a tourist or media moniker than one a native Angelino or anyone who really understands and loves the city would tend to employ), and Mr. Chazelle would seem to feel that he's produced an homage, if not a scion to the Hollywood musicals of yesteryear. What's interesting about the brief pier interval and the tune, carried on Mr. Gosling's limited and yet d...