Okay, so you’re sitting there watching “La La Land.” You’ve seen Mia ( Emma Stone), a plucky but desperate barista-slash-actress (that hidden underlayer of anxiety is where the potency of Stone’s performance begins), and Sebastian ( Ryan Gosling), a retro-obsessive jazz pianist with a real snob edge to him, meet and square off, bicker like alley cats, do a soft-shoe against the magic-hour L.A. There’s a challenge built into the film’s structure. Here’s why - though please know that I can’t talk about “La La Land” without revealing crucial aspects of it, so if you’re looking to see the movie unspoiled, don’t read on. And once it snags you, it keeps getting better. It’s a filmmaking trifecta - it hooks the heart, the eye, and the mind. (Once you’ve hooked into it, though, the rapture seems more heightened because of its off-centeredness.) “La La Land” isn’t just a stylized nostalgia trip of champagne montages and harmonizing hearts. Here are a few thoughts as to why Damien Chazelle’s film, for all the spangly seduction of its surface, is a movie whose very rapture is elusive and off-center. That’s just the way it happens with certain movies even a great one can kick in more fully on the second date. I liked “La La Land” a lot the first time I saw it, but I confess that I didn’t fall head over tap shoes in love with it until I’d seen it a second time.

It truly is a romance, but it’s also about what it takes to be an artist in a world that may or may not believe in art anymore. (Half an hour before it ends, you’ll have no idea where it’s going.) It’s Boy Meets Girl meets the precarious freedom of 21st-century love. It’s a grand Los Angeles epic that features “mainstream” sentiments, but it’s also a subtle and idiosyncratic journey that’s almost entirely unpredictable. It’s Old Hollywood meets Jacques Demy meets “New York, New York” meets postmodern indie backlot passion. It’s the new-fangled version of a sprawling Tinseltown classic. Yet “La La Land” isn’t just old-fashioned. The simplest thing you could call it is “an old-fashioned musical” - which means, of course, that it’s a big colorful splashy cornball swoon of a movie, one that traffics in the kind of billboard emotions (Love! Sadness! Joy!) and timeless Hollywood forms (Singing! Dancing! A Lavish Freeway Production Number Done In One Unbroken Take!) that can hit audiences like a sweet shot to the heart. “ La La Land,” in theory, is a movie that needs no explanation.

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