Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench has more ambition than its talent can possibly live up to, but it’s an invigorating experience nonetheless. When is the last time you saw a film that combined in-your-face, Cassavetes intimacy with full-blown musical production numbers? The writing-directing debut of Damien Chazelle, this began as a student project and finishes as something that still has rough, film-school edges (fumbling camerawork, unsteady performances, a stretched narrative even at 84 minutes). Yet the movie, which is an impressionistic remembrance of a romance between a jazz trumpeter (Jason Palmer) and a graduate student (Desiree Garcia), also provides a handful of promising La La Land premonitions (not least because composer Justin Hurwitz would expand on some of the same musical themes that he first offered here). And it should be noted that the ending, involving an extended Palmer trumpet solo, is just about perfect.
