Here’s to the Fools Who Dream: La La Land

Few modern musicals have captured the Hollywood romance aesthetic as vividly—or as heartbreakingly—as Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016). The film’s soaring, energetic highs and crushing emotional lows are beautifully embodied in technicolor sunsets, choreographed dance numbers, and wistful piano motifs. That Mia and Sebastian, the two main characters, ultimately don’t end up together, does little to stop throngs of devoted fans from romanticizing their relationship, often reduced to platitudes of heartbreak, “right person, wrong time”, and the yearning question of “what could have been.” But beneath this sentimentality lies a far more complex emotional dynamic. 

On Letterboxd, the synopsis of the film opens almost like a toast, an ode: “HERE’S TO THE FOOLS WHO DREAM.” It’s celebratory, yes—but the phrase also lingers, quietly unresolved. What becomes of the fools who dream? Why must they be fools? And why can’t their love survive?

From the very beginning, Mia and Sebastian built their relationship on dreams. Quite literally, they meet chasing creative ambitions in Los Angeles. Her, to be an actress; him, to open a jazz club that preserves the genre’s “pure” form. She encounters him stumbling into a restaurant, drawn by his hauntingly beautiful, melancholic, quietly emotional piano theme (dubbed “Mia and Sebastian’s Theme”). That he literally gets fired for playing his own jazz instead of the obviously bland background music he was repeatedly told to play highlights his embodiment as the struggling, yet ‘pure’ artist. They walk through the movie sets at Warner Bros. Studios, playing at Mia’s Hollywood dream of stardom. Their attraction is intoxicating precisely because it is idealistic. More than just romance, their love is meta-romantic; they embody their dreams so fully that at first, their characters feel almost archetypal. They fall in love with each other’s dreams, with each other as dreamers, with the idea of dreaming itself. This is love at its most cinematic: an enchanting fantasy, untethered from consequence, bathed in starlight. They’re in la la land—literally.

But just as the romance begins to feel like a fairytale, Chazelle dismantles this illusion. As the real world begins to reassert itself, the unsustainability of their dream-world becomes clear. Sebastian, frustrated by the impracticality of his jazz club fantasy, joins a commercially successful band that plays watered-down jazz-funk. Mia, devastated by the failure of her one-woman play, considers giving up acting entirely. When she finally gets her big break, it entails a move to Paris that Sebastian cannot commit to. Their relationship begins to strain under the weight of ambition, insecurity, and the simple logistics of career trajectories. The very dreams that brought them together become the source of their unraveling.

This is where La La Land distinguishes itself. The tragedy isn’t that they didn’t try; it’s that they were always destined to be temporary. Their love could only exist in a dream-state, in that magical liminal space between failure and success, when both of them were still reaching. It sounds almost paradoxical: A romance film on the impossibility of love? 

Yet this is exactly what the film embodies. In a breathtaking sequence that plays almost like a classic Hollywood montage, we see Sebastian’s imagined version of a ‘perfect’ ending—in which he does end up with Mia, but at the cost of his own dreams. He never signs the band contract, follows her to Paris, and sits beside her in the audience of the jazz bar he never opens. Their romance survives, but his artistic vision fades away. This sets up a dichotomy in which their dreams and their relationship exist in quiet opposition, each demanding a sacrifice the other cannot afford. As his song ends, we return to a melancholic reality: Sebastian is alone on stage, and Mia is married. But he has become the artist he always dreamt of being, and so has she.

The final scene, then, is a confrontation of love at its most difficult. The silent moment they share is heavy with meanings unsaid—a bittersweet acknowledgement of their shared past, perhaps a wistful ode to failed love. But there’s also joy and pride: a recognition of who they’ve become, that both have fulfilled the ambitions that once drew them together. As Mia leaves the bar, Sebastian is left at the piano alone. He takes a moment, smiles to himself, nods, and begins to play a new song. The film dwells not on the longing for “what could have been”, but on closure, growth and acceptance. Sebastian no longer yearns for an alternate ending and instead finds a quiet contentment in the artist he has become. 

He understands that their love mattered, not for how long it lasted, but for how it shaped them. Mia’s insistent faith in Sebastian’s original dream, despite creating a rift between them, was a powerful anchor to his love for classic jazz even as he began to stray away. Sebastian’s unwavering belief in Mia pushed Mia to audition for what would become her first major role, even after she seemed to have lost all hope in an acting career. The remnants we are left with—the raw beauty and authenticity of their piano theme, and the logo Mia designed, ‘Seb’s’, glowing softly at the front of his bar—stand as quiet, powerful reminders of a love at once formative and transformative. Chazelle plays on the very idea of romantic success: They got everything they wanted—except each other. But this doesn’t refute their love. By letting go of fantasy, they retain something deeper: artistic integrity, personal fulfillment, and the memory of a love that was real, even if it couldn’t last forever.

La La Land resists a fairytale ending—regardless of how much audiences might want it—in favor of something more honest. It asks the harder questions: How does love shape us? How can it be transformative, beautiful, even life-defining, and still end? By masquerading as a beautiful romance musical, the film takes our inner romantic—the part of us that yearns, that searches for that perfect soulmate and capital L “Love”—and gently guides us to a perhaps more painful, but ultimately more holistic understanding of love. 

“Here’s to the fools who dream.” It’s a toast to the bittersweet truth that to dream is, by nature, to risk. To risk failure, to risk heartbreak, to risk losing the person you love (“You fool!” the fans say). But also—maybe—to become exactly who you were meant to be.

Rayson Dai is a sophomore studying Sociology and Economics. He loves film, music, writing, and photography. His favorite film of all time is 3 Idiots (2009), which he thinks everyone should watch at least once.

@rayson.dai