Heading into next month’s Academy Awards with a staggering fourteen nominations, Damien Chazelle’s third feature La La Land is poised to win big. In some ways, this praise—which is all but inevitable—will be deserved. On the surface, the auteur’s film is a big-hearted movie about movies (and jazz, analogously) that strives for sincerity and reverent nostalgia. Like a sunnier Birdman, which won Best Picture in 2014, or a more self-referential The Artist, which won in 2011, La La Land pays plenty of homage to its cinematic forebears while implying an allegiance by association.

Yet in spite of its Old Hollywood adulation, the film paints deeply pessimistic portraits of the current states of both the film industry and the music world. Insincerity abounds, and it is up to our heroes—Mia and Sebastian (respectively played by the very famous Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling)—to bring Real Artistry back to the center. Implicitly, in staging this now-familiar drama, Chazelle casts himself as a hero of earnestness as well, heaping on references to the Classics—Casablanca, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Rebel Without a Cause—in a genuflective gesture of pure adulation.

Mia is meant to be one of the good ones, a rare talent with both acting chops and writerly ambitions who’s just waiting to get her lucky break. Instead, she toils in auditions for various dead-end roles, until the alluring Sebastian—a similarly struggling jazz pianist—convinces her to “write something as interesting as [she is].” It’s the setup for a potentially great tale of mutual creativity complicated, as always, by romance. And she does write, or so we are told outright. In fact, “It’s genius!”—at least according to Sebastian after Mia performs her play for him in his bedroom. But the viewer is not afforded this luxury; we must take her auditor at his word, even though we never get to hear a line. And like the play itself—indeed, because of its insubstantiality—Mia’s supposed artistry functions only as a simulacrum: a suggestion of talent, a series of indirect gestures, orbiting around a center that cannot hold because it doesn’t actually exist. Sebastian’s prophetic advice ironically comes true—whatever Mia produces is, for the viewer, just as interesting as her character. Which is to say not very much at all.

At best, Chazelle’s negligence in fleshing out Mia’s artistry reflects the difficulty of writing a good script. In such a case, it demonstrates an ironic recursion: since the flaws of Chazelle’s script are intimately related to the lack of a visible script for Mia’s play, the extra-diegetic nonexistence of the latter might just reflect the fact that it’s too dang hard to write a real script-within-a-script in the first place—I mean, I already wrote one, Chazelle might have said. We can’t all be Shakespeare! At worst, though, he has bought wholesale into the deeply sexist logic that aspiring jazz drummer Andrew, Miles Teller’s character in Chazelle’s previous film Whiplash, uses to justify breaking up with his girlfriend Nicole (Melissa Benoist). “I want to be one of the greats,” Andrew petulantly explains. “And I would stop you from doing that?” she replies. “Yeah.” Whiplash was self-aware about the negative effects of Andrew’s Ahab-like monomania, but Chazelle, whose desire to be One of the Greats is evident everywhere in La La Land, seems blind to his own lesson. Thus a deeply cynical reading aligns Chazelle’s indifference toward Mia’s potential artistic depth with Andrew’s disregard for Nicole: the point is that women get in the way of serious (male) artists, and they should be treated (as characters and as people) secondarily if at all.

But then what do we make of Sebastian, whose earnest love of Real Jazz, vinyl records, and living in bohemian squalor makes him scan as a more grown-up, less egotistical Andrew? “The world doesn’t need any more actresses,” Mia admits at one point. But in the logic of La La Land, it very clearly does need more guys like Seb, who plays the piano (beautifully! on screen! many, many times!) and dreams of opening his own club. Sebastian retains an endearing shred of his predecessor’s petulance, and one of Mia’s major roles in the film (in fact, the only role we get to see her play) is to assuage these tendencies when they flare up. He joins a band to make money, even though he hates the music, and she assures him that the group is actually pretty good. Most touchingly, she moves him to change the proposed name of the club, which he eventually does open, from an obscure Charlie Parker reference to something simpler: Seb’s.

When this is revealed at the end, it’s quite affecting. Mia, now a famous movie star, ambles into a subterranean jazz club with her blandly wealthy and not-quite-as-handsome husband. But lo and behold: Sebastian’s at the piano, resplendent in the spotlight, saving jazz one blue note at a time. He addresses another pianist, a young black man who has just finished playing with his combo: “He might own this place one day if I’m not careful”—but not in this movie, ha ha. And then he notices Mia, his great lost love, whose loss—Beatrice-like—has blended with his love of jazz to realize the club of his dreams, the club that decadent, gentrifying Los Angeles urgently needs. There’s a strong sense in their exchange of gazes that neither could have achieved his or her success without the other, and that even though they’ve parted ways, each will always recognize the other’s impact: Mia, for her Manic Pixie muse service, and Seb, for his gruff insistence on getting her to that big audition, the one that would Change Her Life forever.

This sentimentality is deeply felt, but like all sentiment, it’s manipulative and sophistic. There is, it goes without saying, no correspondent scene in which Sebastian becomes proudly, complexly aware of Mia’s triumphant dream-fulfillment. Chazelle doesn’t seem to care, and since he hasn’t provided any direct evidence that Mia’s work is actually good, neither do we, in the moment. The signifiers of her success— fancy house, fancy car, chatter in the air as she walks elegantly out of a coffee shop—are, however briefly, believable enough. But the signs empty out when the film ends, at which point the narrative imbalance between its two protagonists becomes impossible to overlook or explain away. In this movie that uncritically equates nostalgic reverence with quality in its treatment of both its art forms, Sebastian’s filmic analogue is not Mia at all but rather Chazelle himself, whose move to resurrect old Hollywood tropes and gestures is as regressive and quaint as Sebastian’s studied, pleasant, cocktail-party jazz. For Chazelle, Mia exists—to whatever extent she can be said to—for the same purpose that she serves in Sebastian’s creative arc: to lend grace and beauty, to bring his ego down to earth, and to make this deeply male movie (and Seb’s life) a little less solipsistic. But whereas we appreciate the influence Mia has on Sebastian, the limitations of her role in the film reflect nothing positive whatsoever on Damien Chazelle, her egotistic creator and inevitably Oscar-bound usurper.