It’s okay if protagonists aren’t likeable

'They're just so unlikeable' is an increasingly common complaint - but what did you go to the cinema for?

La La Land isn’t a perfect movie, not least because there isn’t such a thing, but it’s an incredibly good one and I think we can objectively say a pretty phenomenal feat of direction: intricate, seamless and creatively alive. Any film that gets 14 Oscar nominations is destined for contrarian, buzz-deflating takes though, and over the weekend a bizarre one came from the Guardian. An excerpt and essentially the crux:

“There are many reasons this movie failed to make me feel as if I was dancing on the ceiling of the Griffith Observatory, but the main one was this: Ryan Gosling’s character is every bad date I have ever had.”

The piece goes on to list all the ways in which Sebastian is a “jazz snob” (true), a “jerk” (true) and “rude” (also true) and claims this makes the film fundamentally unenjoyable and compromised as a romance genre piece. This might be true, were we expected to accept Sebastian as perfect and had Emma Stone’s character Mia found him consistently charming, but, as is patently clear to any viewer employing at least 30% of their attention, we’re not and she doesn’t.

Mia laughs at his pretensions, sneers at his musical elitism and, ultimately (spoilers), straight up moves on with her life and marries another guy. The article and its 5,000+ sharers are so incensed by even the whiff of a mansplainer in the air that they’ve overlooked the film’s (pretty simple) plot, and this is symptomatic of a viewership that seems to demand its protagonists be likeable and relatable.

Thank goodness Sebastian is a jazz snob, a flawed character whose appreciation of the purity of jazz makes him at the same time attractive and impossible; how lifeless would the film be if he was completely woke with regards to jazz as an inadvisable career path and instead focused on applauding girlfriend Mia at her auditions?

I don’t want nice protagonists; they serve as a proxy for the viewer and allow them to imagine for a couple of hours that they are that honourable or victimised person. I want nasty ones, I want hypocritical ones who reflect our own conflicted motives and wavering morals. If your dating history is littered with jazz snobs, let’s see more of them on screen, so that the real ones might realise their lack of self-awareness.

Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann was a film this year that did this well, not deifying its father protagonist, who arrives in his estranged daughter’s life to remind her to make time for silliness as well as careerism, and showing that his outlook has its limitations too. Another, going back a couple of years, is Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip, a film devoid of a single “nice” character and completely refreshing because of this.

In short: give me more jerks.