With this turbo-charged and heavy handed epic, Damien Chazelle returns to that tinsel town movie world where he made his breakthrough with 2016’s Oscar-winning La La Land. This one is all about the chaos and excess of 1920s silent era Hollywood, a topic it approaches by being stridently chaotic and excessive.
It’s a love letter to the movies, inevitably – though I remember Chazelle’s previous films being love letters to actual human beings. Chazelle is concerned to restore some of the minorities who have been erased in Hollywood’s heterosexual history, but he really fudges the new #MeToo conversation about the Hollywood golden age. All the raunchy sex here is very much consensual. And those outrageous party scenes, with the mandatory overhead shots showing the ecstatically unclothed women crowd-surfing face-up … they’re so much like Baz Luhrmann he should be getting a royalty cheque.
Various stock characters swirl around in the movie madness: Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a handsome much-married leading man of a certain age in the John Gilbert mould, whose career is on the slide, concealing his boozy ennui with a veneer of genial suavity. Li Jun Li is stylish and charismatic in the role of Lady Fay Zhu, a gay club singer perhaps inspired by Anna May Wong. Jovan Adepo is Sidney Palmer, a brilliant African American jazz trumpeter who is finally given some onscreen time in the talkies, at the expense of racist “blackface” humiliation in the wake of Al Jolson’s success with The Jazz Singer.
