Start with Whiplash, which is the tightest and the clearest: a drummer and a teacher, and no verdict on whether the abuse worked. Then La La Land for the musical version of the same question, First Man for the coldest, and Babylon if you want the three-hour maximalist one.
Chazelle has made five films and all of them ask the same question: what does a person give up to be exceptional, and was the exchange worth it. A drummer, a musician and an actor, an astronaut, a silent-era Hollywood. He never answers, which is why the films are argued about rather than agreed on.
The other constant is rhythm. He edits to music even when there is no music, and the tension in Whiplash and First Man comes from cutting patterns rather than from dialogue. He also loves a long single take badly enough to open two films with one.
Where to start
Whiplash. A hundred and six minutes, two performances, and the clearest statement of the thing he keeps returning to. It also declines to tell you whether Fletcher was right, which is the feature of his work people most often mistake for a flaw. La La Land second.
Top picks
Filmography
- Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009)
- Whiplash (2014)
- La La Land (2016)
- First Man (2018)
- Babylon (2022)
Sources and further reading
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FAQs about Damien Chazelle
Does Whiplash endorse what Fletcher does?
The film deliberately refuses to say, which is why the argument has not settled. It shows a young man achieving something extraordinary and having destroyed every relationship he had to get there, and it ends on the performance rather than on a judgement. Both readings are supported by the text.
Is First Man worth watching if I dislike space films?
Possibly more than if you like them. Chazelle shoots almost the entire thing in handheld close-up inside the capsule, so it plays as claustrophobic domestic drama rather than as spectacle, and the moon landing is staged as grief. It is his least conventional film by some distance.
Why did Babylon divide people so sharply?
It is three hours, deliberately excessive, and spends its first half-hour on a party sequence designed to be exhausting. Viewers who read the excess as the argument tend to defend it strongly; viewers who read it as indulgence do not. It is the least advisable place to start with him.