Every Damien Chazelle Film, Ranked

The dance at dusk has a witty reason to exist. Mia and Sebastian are two people investing in the idea that they have no use for one another. The choreography gives them a way of continuing the argument after the lyrics would have allowed it to end. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling can share a beat without letting the satisfaction of the timing settle the relationship. That is a useful measure of how well the musical works. Movement can make an attraction visible without having to turn it into a clean decision. The early traffic jam offers a larger version of the same generosity, briefly allowing people with no ongoing place in the story a whole song’s worth of space.

There are stretches where the argument about jazz and authenticity becomes narrower than the film’s openness about performance elsewhere. Sebastian can make a persuasive account of what a form means to him and give the other musicians relatively little space to alter that account. Stone brings more uncertainty to Mia’s audition because the scene can hold the promise of a career beside a remembered life that would matter with or without an offer. The epilogue puts the couple’s unrealized future into movement, decor and color. Its feeling depends on recognizing how much affection the film has already invested in the lives they actually chose. I put it third because some of its smaller human arguments have less room than its great finish, which remains one of the most persuasive things Chazelle has made.

The opening flight gives Neil Armstrong a problem that can be felt before it can be fully understood. Chazelle and cinematographer Linus Sandgren keep the camera near the vibrating surfaces and the narrow view available to the pilot. The machine has tremendous power and remarkably little interest in whether the person operating it can see what he needs to see. When the moon eventually opens into a wider, quieter image, the change of scale feels like a physical event. The film has spent enough time limiting the view for a spectator to recognize the generosity of a horizon.

There is a parallel restriction in Ryan Gosling’s performance. Armstrong can make himself very available to a practical problem and still give his family very little idea how he means to deal with its consequences. Claire Foy’s Janet gives that distance a precise cost when she insists he explain to their sons the possibility that he will not return. The scene has its own procedure. A man who knows how to prepare a mission has to find a form of speech for the people he has reasons to protect and no grounds to reassure. Foy makes the demand feel like part of raising a family rather than an interruption the program must endure.

The story sometimes makes grief available as an explanation for a man whose reserve has already acquired a much wider set of uses. The debated private gesture on the lunar surface is less interesting to me than the film’s attention to the preparation that makes it possible for him to be alone there. It places second for the uncommon consistency between its physical and domestic worlds. Both make room for people who have to do something consequential with incomplete information. Gosling’s small responses let that quality survive long after the most celebrated event in the movie has already been accomplished.

J.K. Simmons makes Fletcher frightening in part because a student can spend a few extra seconds hoping that he has understood the man’s attention correctly. Being singled out might mean an invitation. It might mean a performance is about to be taken apart in front of the other musicians. Miles Teller gives Andrew the capacity to hear a challenge as a chance long after somebody with different ambitions would have been able to leave the room. Chazelle builds an unusually legible kind of suspense from the overlap. Each person in the audience can understand the cost of being wrong about the man running the band, whether or not they can name the thing he says he heard.

The film’s tightness comes with a limitation. Jazz can make unusual forms of collective attention possible, and the movie gives a narrower account of its practice than some of its characterizations of mastery suggest. The closing performance is rich partly because it makes that limitation uncomfortable. The cutting and sound can give the viewer a tremendous reward for the very behavior the story has made disturbing. Teller and Simmons find a way to look at each other that can be experienced as recognition. It does not release either person from what they have already done to get there. The pleasure is real enough to make the relationship harder to judge.

That final minute remains the strongest reason to put Whiplash first. Chazelle uses the means by which he has made the film entertaining to produce an unresolved feeling about the entertainment. A beat can land with immense satisfaction while leaving the audience uncertain about the room in which it has landed. His later films find more generous communities and more expansive images. This one gives his central preoccupation its clearest and most uncomfortable form. You can hear the achievement and still wonder what the people who made it will be able to do next.