189 min | R | December 23, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
Hollywood in the 1920s runs on cocaine, ambition, and elephant dung. Damien Chazelle hurls orgies, vomit, and doomed silent-era stars at the screen until something sticks. A lot of it does not.
Los Angeles in the late 1920s is a dream factory built on excess. Manny Torres works the parties and the sets and wants to belong to the movies. Nellie LaRoy crashes into stardom on raw nerve and zero shame. Jack Conrad is the silent era’s biggest star watching sound arrive like a death sentence. Damien Chazelle frames the film as a love letter to cinema and an autopsy of the industry that produces it. The thesis is that the machine devours the people who feed it.
Diego Calva plays Manny with watchful restraint and serves as the eyes of the film. He records the decadence without quite drowning in it. Margot Robbie plays Nellie as pure unfiltered want, crying on cue in a single take and treating every room as a stage she refuses to leave. Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad as a man whose charm carries an expiration date he cannot read. Jean Smart plays gossip columnist Elinor St. John and delivers the film’s sharpest scene, explaining to Jack exactly why the industry will outlive him and feel nothing. Jovan Adepo plays jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer and absorbs a single act of degradation that says more about the era than the orgies do.
Chazelle writes and directs with a maximalist’s appetite for motion. Linus Sandgren’s camera never stops. It careens through the opening mansion party in roving unbroken sweeps that turn the crowd into a single writhing organism. Justin Hurwitz scores the chaos with a manic recurring jazz theme that functions as the film’s pulse and its drug. The standout sequence puts Nellie on a sound stage where synchronized audio turns a simple scene into a torture of failed takes, and a single dropped line ruins hours of work. Tom Cross cuts the early reels at a velocity that exhilarates and then exhausts.
Chazelle wants this to be everything at once. It is a celebration, a tragedy, an epic, and a tantrum, and it cannot hold all of those shapes at the same time. The craft is undeniable and the structure is a mess. Scenes that should land skid past because the film refuses to slow down and choose what matters. The closing montage reaches for transcendence and grabs sentiment instead. There is a great film buried inside the excess. Chazelle keeps shoveling more excess on top of it.