Third time’s a charm for Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. The pair will officially star in Damien Chazelle’s musical La La Land, per a press release from Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment.

Gosling and Stone – who previously appeared opposite each other in Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad – will play Sebastian and Mia, respectively, two people “drawn together by their common desire to do what they love.” Problems arise, however, after each reach a level of success and “they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.”

Chazelle, an Oscar nominee this year for Whiplash, wrote La La Land before production began on his Best Picture nominee, and the director told EW he even entertained the notion of making the musical before his jazz drama.

“It’s just a bigger scope project so it was harder to get off the ground without much previous directing experience,” he said. “So Whiplash went first. But as soon as Whiplash was done shooting, I knew what I wanted my next movie to be. There was never a question. It was just about hitting the ground running right after Sundance and locking up the financing.”

Originally, Miles Teller, who starred in Whiplash, and Emma Watson had been attached to the film, but other projects forced the pair to drop from contention. La La Land will arrive in theaters next summer, on July 15, 2016.

J.K. Simmons, who won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his role in Damien Chazelle's Whiplash, has signed on to Chazelle's next project, the musical La La Land.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are starring in the Summit film, which is a modern take on the Hollywood musical following a jazz pianist (Gosling) who falls for an aspiring actress (Stone) in Los Angeles. But as success mounts, they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fabric of their love affair.

Jessica Rothe, Sonoya Mizuno and Callie Hernandez also recently joined the project to play Stone's character's three roommates. Simmons will play a character called "Boss."

The new film from Whiplash wunderkind Damien Chazelle takes place far away from the bloody drumsticks and sadomasochism of a New York City music conservatory. La La Land, starring Crazy, Stupid, Love and Gangster Squad comrades Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, is a musical set in modern-day Los Angeles. The title, a common pejorative for the Southern California metropolis, is not at all intended as snark — as is evident from this marvelously old-fashioned moment of song and dance in the film, where we see a musician (played by Gosling) and a struggling actress (Stone) express their blossoming love for each other via a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers-inspired waltz.

“There’s an incredible romanticism in L.A. that you don’t always see when you’re stuck in traffic on the 405,” says Chazelle, who shot this scene during a September sunset in Griffith Park. “I wanted to make a big love letter to the city and focus on that push and pull that all young artists experience, between dreams and reality, which old Hollywood musicals are so good at expressing. I just love the idea of a whole emotional arc told purely visually and musically. And it’s a city that’s so filled with dreamers, most of whom won’t make it. I think there’s something poetic about that.”

Chazelle, 30, cites one of Astaire and Rogers’ most enchanting dance sequences, one set during a summer storm in 1935’s Top Hat, “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain),” as a specific reference point. Yet he also gives props to Thom Andersen’s extraordinary Los Angeles Plays Itself, a 2003 documentary, available now on Netflix. “I absolutely adore that film,” he says. “L.A. is weirdly the most filmed city in the world because the movie industry has been there forever, but it’s one of the least physical cities in movies. It doesn’t have a specific place in cinema the way that New York or Paris does. Which is why everyone has their own idea of L.A., and many are not the most pleasant ideas. But if treated the right way, L.A. is can definitely hold its own as a romantic playground.”

La La Land reunites Chazelle with Whiplash Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, who has a small role as someone in the life of Gosling’s character, and with that film’s editor, Tom Cross, who also took home a golden statuette. But the team’s goals this time were different, with Chazelle emphasizing longer, more fluid shots and an unhurried pace. “Whiplash was very much about the kinetic editing and images colliding against each other,” he says, “whereas this is about telling the story through camera and blocking. It’s a style which is more suited to the musical but I think also more romantic.”

While not a love story, Whiplash most certainly touched upon the drama that takes place when intense artistic dreams intersect with the challenges of living in the real world. Interestingly, Chazelle was himself a stymied young artist while writing La La Land. He’d been taking cracks at the screenplay since he was in college, and feeling blocked and dead-ended a few years ago, he shelved the script and vented some of his frustration…by writing and then directing Whiplash. “The two movies couldn’t be more tonally different,” he insists. “But they’re both about reconciling your dreams with the need to be human. La La Land is just much less angry about it.”

La La Land arrives in theaters on July 15.

Lionsgate and Summit are pushing back the release of Damien Chazelle's La La Land from July 15 to December, the heart of awards season.

The modern-day musical, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, will open in select theaters Dec. 2 before expanding nationwide Dec. 16. Lionsgate also announced that Molly Smith's Black Label Media has come aboard to co-finance the movie following their collaboration on Sicario.

La La Land marks Chazelle's follow-up to indie darling Whiplash and reunites the director with the pic's Oscar-winning supporting actor J.K. Simmons.

A modern-day take on the classic Hollywood musical, La La Land follows a jazz pianist (Gosling) who falls for an aspiring actress (Stone) in Los Angeles. But as success mounts, they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fabric of their love affair.

Pete Hammond (Deadline)
“Coming off the promise of the Oscar winning Whiplash, it will be no surprise that writer/director Damien Chazelle is a talented filmmaker, but that movie did not prepare me for the experience of seeing La La Land, his homage to the great screen musicals of French director Jacques Demy as well as MGM’s golden era. But this is too smart a movie maker to just do a simple tribute to a bygone era, his film starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone is a gorgeous romantic fever dream of a musical that should hit contemporary audiences right in their sweet spot. It has been a very long time since we have seen something quite this lyrical, lovely, and most importantly, original on the screen, but at the same time it is a musical that has its feet firmly planted in the real world , even if the one up there on the wide Cinemascope screen is very stylized.”

Todd McCarthy (The Hollywood Reporter)
“Happily, the two leads are clearly entirely in synch with [Chazelle’s] objectives. Sebastian has a certain gruff impatience and short temper born of creative frustration, but the concern and love he feels for Mia doesn’t take long to well up. Gosling may not be a trained dancer or musician, but his moves are appealingly his own and months of piano practice have given him convincing style on the keyboards. Stone is simply a joy as the eternally aspiring actress it’s hard to believe is being passed over. Emotionally alive and able to shift gears on a dime, Stone is all the more convincing in this context as she has the kind of looks that would have been appealing in any era, particularly the 1930s and 1950s.”

Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)
“It’s an unapologetically romantic homage to classic movie musicals, splashing its poster-paint energy and dream-chasing optimism on the screen. With no little audacity, La La Land seeks its own place somewhere on a continuum between Singin’ in the Rain and Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, with a hint of Alan Parker’s Fame for the opening sequence, in which a bunch of young kids with big dreams, symbolically stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway leading to Los Angeles, get out of their cars and stage a big dance number.”

Eric Kohn (Indiewire)
“At its best, La La Land probes the irony of its existence, celebrating the greatness of a bygone era in the context of changing times. ‘That’s LA,’ Sebastian concludes. ‘They worship everything and they value nothing.’ But that doesn’t stop him from getting fired up about the underlying power of classic jazz. ‘You can’t hear it,’ he implores Mia. ‘You have to see it.’ To that end, La La Land succeeds in making its sweet imagery sing, particularly with the sensational finale. In a wordless explosion of lights and shadows, Chazelle reignites the movie with fresh context that forces it to get real. Here, he arrives at the wrenching conclusion that even the most vibrant fantasy eventually must fade to black.”

Alonso Duralde (The Wrap)
“TCM addicts will swoon over that traffic-jam number, not to mention a dance sequence that delightfully defies gravity. The vocal duets between Stone and Gosling are charming even though they both have singing voices that might diplomatically be called ‘naturalistic.’ (Similarly, the songs by composer Justin Hurwitz and Broadway lyricists Pasek and Paul aren’t traditional show-stoppers, but they sneak up on you by the second reprise.) … Gosling and Stone’s powerful chemistry is as palpable as it was in Crazy Stupid Love — they were that film’s sole selling point — and each of them conveys their character’s love of the arts and drive to succeed.”

Owen Gleiberman (Variety)
“La La Land isn’t a masterpiece (and on some level it wants to be). Yet it’s an exciting ramble of a movie, ardent and full of feeling, passionate but also exquisitely — at times overly — controlled. It winds up swimming in melancholy, yet its most convincing pleasures are the moments when it lifts the audience into a state of old-movie exaltation, leading us to think, ‘What a glorious feeling. I’m happy again.’”