La La Land: Mia and Seb's Los Angeles

The film opens on a Los Angeles freeway ramp with every car in the jam singing, and it is here that Mia and Seb lean out of their windows and shout at each other. "Another Day of Sun" was the first thing shot, over two days on closed-off connector ramps between the I-105 carpool lanes and the I-110 express lanes, both directions of the westbound lane taken over with half the cars facing backwards. The interchange is a five-level stack more than 130 feet high, beside the Harbor Freeway Metro station.

Location precision: The number used the whole left-side connector ramp; the pin marks the interchange itself, south-east of downtown.

Mia first hears Seb at the jazz club the film calls Lipton's, when he ignores the owner's warning and improvises, and she walks in to watch him get fired for it and tries to compliment him as he storms out. The door used for the outside is a plain storefront on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood. The room she walks into was the SmokeHouse Restaurant on West Lakeside Drive in Burbank, an industry hangout because it faces the Warner Bros. lot directly across the road.

Location precision: Lipton's is invented; the pin marks the SmokeHouse Restaurant, whose interior doubled as the club.

Seb walks into the café where Mia works between auditions, and she takes him around the Warner Bros. backlot, talking about movies the whole way. The café itself is fiction: it was invented for the picture, though it has since become a fixture on the studio tour, which has been a public attraction since 1973. The stage the two of them are seen walking on is the lot's old water-tank stage, 98 feet high and one of the largest in the world.

Location precision: The café was created for the film; the pin marks the Warner Bros. Burbank lot where Mia works.

Visitor guidance: The Warner Bros. Studio Tour takes visitors onto the lot in Burbank, and the café set is now a stop on it.

Seb takes Mia to hear live jazz, to make the case for his music and his dream of a club of his own. The club in the film is the Lighthouse Café, a real one at 30 Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach that has been a jazz showcase since 1949; the building went up as a restaurant in 1934 and became a bar in 1940. Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis all played the house band here as guests. The pier at the west end of the same street is the next stop.

Visitor guidance: The Lighthouse Café, 30 Pier Avenue, Hermosa Beach — a short walk from the pier at the west end of Pier Avenue.

Leaving Mia at the jazz club, Seb goes out onto the pier and sings to the town at twilight, dancing alone. The present structure replaced a wooden pier that washed away in 1913: 1,000 feet of concrete running out into the Pacific. Near the root stands a small auditorium built about 1914, its rooms now given over to the public restrooms, the lifeguard service and the local library.

Visitor guidance: Hermosa Beach Pier, at the west end of Pier Avenue, on the strand south of the Lighthouse Café.

Mia admits she has never seen Rebel Without a Cause, and Seb points out that it is conveniently showing at the Rialto, 1023 South Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena. They get no further than the projector before it fails, which is how they end up at the Observatory. The 1925 house was a 1,200-seat single screen; it had shut in 2007, and part of its facade fell onto the sidewalk in 2010.

The abandoned screening takes Mia and Seb up to the Observatory, 2800 East Observatory Road in Griffith Park, where they kiss while the city sleeps below. The real building played itself; only the planetarium had to be rebuilt in a studio. It has stood on this hill since 14 May 1935, when it opened as the country's third planetarium, and its 12-inch Zeiss refracting scope — the most looked-through telescope in the world, with more than nine million people behind it — is still on show.

Visitor guidance: Admission has been free since 1935, in accordance with Griffith's will.

In the date montage that follows, Mia and Seb ride the little funicular up Bunker Hill — built in 1901 and shut since 2013 after a derailment. It was run for a single day of shooting, and safety officials then closed it to cameras; Gosling had never been on it before. It reopened to the public in 2017, and the cars are called Sinai and Olivet.

Visitor guidance: Bottom station at 351 South Hill Street, top station on South Olive Street, on the steep climb over Bunker Hill.

Five years on, Mia and her husband wander into a jazz bar, and she recognises the logo she had once designed. Seb is at the piano, playing the two of them a love theme, and they trade a smile across the room before the film imagines the life they did not get. The club is called Seb's. Its exterior is the Black club on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood; the room inside was The Blind Donkey on Linden Avenue in Long Beach.

Location precision: Seb's is invented; the exterior is the Black club at 6202 Santa Monica Boulevard and the interior was filmed in Long Beach.