As a viewer, you identify with miserable Sebastian far less than you do the tipsy, half-dressed starlets cheering from the swimming pool.

But the cover band sounds great blazing through “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls. There’s no mistaking the tone of pity in this scene. By this point, we’re already meant to understand that he’s a genuine artist, yet here he is forced to play keytar in a cheesy ’80s-pop cover band - a humiliation made only worse by the arrival of Mia, a woman he’d like to impress, played by Emma Stone.

You get a sense early on that “La La Land” is going to have problems when it shows us Sebastian debasing himself for a paycheck at a party in the Hollywood Hills.

But here’s the curious thing about this polarizing movie that gets so much wrong about the purpose and value of art: When “La La Land” uses music in the manner of the classic musicals it’s obviously emulating - not to put us inside a world but to take us out of one - the movie achieves liftoff.

La la land soundtrack city of stars