5 out of 5 stars

On a black screen, a low drumbeat begins, tentatively. It builds. It becomes faster, and faster. Soon it’s at a relentless pace, the pitter-patter sound of drumsticks hitting the batter head so urgently it sounds like gunfire. It almost seems as though it won’t stop, that it can’t stop safely. The title card appears briefly onscreen: Whiplash.

Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a young drummer, who’s only just started attending the Shaffer Conservatory, a prestigious music school in New York City. He aspires to become one of the greats, idolising the likes of Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich. When an intimidating teacher named Terence Fletcher (J.K Simmons) notices his perseverance as he’s practising one night, he invites him to play in the studio ensemble. Andrew thinks his life is about to change, and it is… but not in the way he’s hoping.

Without question the most thrilling film about jazz ever made, Whiplash explores the disturbing mentalities of those who are questing for greatness. Andrew, still only a teenager and determined to capture fame and glory, unknowingly enters a Faustian bargain. With expert direction, a fantastically balanced script, and sensational performances that remain transfixing with each viewing, Whiplash is a modern masterpiece. It’s a probing investigation into how we each quantify success and happiness, and how the desire to be the best is, more often than not, fraught with hardship.

And regardless of how his father attempts to placate him, Andrew does want to be the best. He’s searching for an illusory form of happiness: appreciation and praise from his capricious tormentor. After that, world glory and esteemed recognition in history books. Not only are these aspirations elusive, but they cause him to spurn the genuine happiness he’s already found in his normal life: family, relationships, and a burgeoning self-confidence. All of these things disappear in his unending chase of glory. But why?

Because Andrew is broken somehow. He lacks something (he may have lacked it his entire life), and he’s searching for it in amorphous, intangible forms. We’re never force-fed Andrew’s backstory through a sappy monologue. Yet, we can see it in his thousand-yard stare, an aching sense of longing for achievement which he believes will finally fill the hole in his heart. He’s so obviously an awkward outcast that it leaves him vulnerable to Fletcher’s manipulative treatment: like any predator, Fletcher immediately can discern the young boy’s insecurities.

With the warm smile of a crocodile, Fletcher charmingly enquires about Andrew’s upbringing. He divulges briefly that there are no musicians in his family: he doesn’t know his mother, who left him when he was a baby, and his father is an author. When he’s asked what his father has published, he quickly corrects himself: “Well he’s… I guess he’s more of a teacher.” It’s plain on his face that he’s embarrassed by his father’s average artistic achievements, ashamedly admitting he works at Pennington High School.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a teacher, but it does reveal Andrew’s central conflict: he views anonymity as ignominious. It’s for this reason that he’s so disgusted when his father, Jim (Paul Reiser), questions his drive: “You’ve got plenty of options.” Andrew stares at the floor: “What does that mean?” Perhaps worried for his son, Jim incessantly second-guesses Andrew’s decision to pursue music through underhand remarks: “At my age, you get perspective.”

But Andrew has a singleness of purpose—there’s nothing else outside his drumming: “I don’t want perspective.” This is represented in the fact that he has one picture on his wall—Buddy Rich, electric on his drum set. There doesn’t appear to be any logic to his obsession; at times, he looks at his drums with a defeated glimmer in his eye. They loom ominously in front of him, like a beast that will devour his future.

Those drums do exactly that: they eat up every bit of Andrew’s life. This is seen in only the opening shot when Andrew is seen far away down a hallway. Practising solitarily at night, it’s evident that his passion renders him alone. On his way home, he passes by a dorm party, but we know innately that there’s no chance that he’ll stay—he’s incongruous. Whether because he really believes it or because it’s a learned attitude, he claims he doesn’t care for friends, frivolous socialising, or aimless use of his time. He just wants to become the best.

Throughout the story, his obsession isolates him further. This is particularly worsened when nobody takes his ambition seriously at a family gathering. After having his artistic progression nonchalantly dismissed, an argument ensues, one that his father does nothing to mitigate. One can’t help but suspect he wants his son to come back down to earth before he has his wings scorched by the sun.

With this in mind, Whiplash is as much a story about obsession as it’s a tale of two father figures: his real dad, Jim, who cares for his emotional well-being and mental stability, and his adoptive father Fletcher, a tyrant who strives in every interaction to push him to the limit—if not past it. There’s an unlikely (but fitting) comparison to be made between this film and Star Wars (1977), with two parental figures representing the light and the dark. Fletcher, perennially dressed in black, becomes something akin to a Darth Vader archetype, with his father becoming the powerless Obi-Wan, desperate to protect his son from the forces of evil.

It’s apparent from the moment Fletcher arrives in the story that he’s bad news: he’s like a spectre. Standing in the doorway, watching Andrew play, he already begins belittling him: “I asked you why you stopped playing, and your version of an answer was to turn into a wind-up monkey?” He selects Andrew not because he’s the best, but because he has a drive that can be directed, a strong spirit which he can crush so that it’ll grow back stronger.

Because Fletcher doesn’t want a good player; he wants someone he can mould into a great player—-one of the greats. There are a multitude of manipulative ways in which he strives to achieve this: he artificially constructs competition through Tanner (Nate Lang) and Connelly (Austin Stowell). Truthfully, both drummers are expendable to him. Like pawns on a chessboard, he only moves them to affect Andrew.

In discussing his close working relationship with trainer Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson revealed how Cus would instil belief in him, only to follow it up with a barrage of denigrating statements. When eavesdropping, Tyson would hear his trainer (who was like a father figure to the young pugilist) speak about him in glowing terms.

Yet, D’Amato would put him down constantly when they were training, calling him fat, slow, and too short to be the heavyweight champion of the world. D’Amato was teaching him to earn his affection; it was not something given unconditionally. In this respect, it provided a goal for young Mike to work towards from day to day, which in turn allowed for loftier awards to be achieved.

The same is true of Fletcher. In the hallway, the conservatory instructor kindly intones: “You’re here for a reason.” During practice, as Andrew plays his first set, he’s all compliments: “We got Buddy Rich here!” But within three minutes, he turns almost completely: “You are a worthless, friendless, little piece of shit.” Why? Because he wanted to give him the sweet feeling of approval that Andrew’s searching for so desperately—right before wrenching it away again, for everyone to see.

He intentionally makes a spectacle of humiliating Andrew; he wants to ensure he’ll never forget it. Because that’s the important part: to endure the hardship that’s to follow, Andrew must never, ever be capable of forgetting just how painful it was to have an idol ridicule him mercilessly in front of his peers. He wants to make him feel worthless, to engender a chronic dissatisfaction in him so that it may manifest in an iron discipline.

I don’t think it would have mattered if Andrew had been on tempo—Fletcher would have crushed him anyway, just so that he could’ve become better. Because he doesn’t perceive passion as something to be enjoyed, but something that is owed: if you really care about being great, if you sincerely want to give the world something truly special, then you must give your entirety to your art. You must constantly strive to be better.

And that pivotal moment in his life does change Andrew. Whether it’s for the better or the worse depends on your perspective. For the dogmatically determined, Andrew’s decision to forgo life’s luxuries and dedicate himself to a single cause may be seen as admirable. In the 1970s, Goldman’s dilemma explored the unwaveringly determined mentalities of Olympians. Physician Robert M. Goldman asked combat sports and powerlifting athletes if they would take a pill that would grant them unparalleled success in their respective sports, knowing it would also kill them in five years. More than half claimed they would take it.

Conducting research from 1982-1995, it was a figure which remained consistent. This obsessive mentality mirrors something that Andrew says at the climactic argument at the dinner table: “I’d rather die drunk, broke at 34 and have people at a dinner table talk about me, than live to be rich and sober at 90, and nobody remembered who I was.” Andrew frames the ephemeral happiness in this life as a vacuous entity—he’s searching for legacy, a cold, everlasting sense of achievement.

This way of thinking is so ingrained in his personality that Andrew is perplexed by people who settle for mediocrity. He’s quietly ashamed of his father. He’s overtly disgusted by the adulation given to his cousins for lacklustre achievements. And his girlfriend’s lack of direction puzzles him, presenting a rift in their pairing, one which will inevitably cause them to separate. Uncle Frank (Chris Mulkey) asks him: “Got any friends, Andy?” Our protagonist replies: “I don’t see the use.” Everything in his life is judged based on its utility; how helpful or detrimental will this be to my chances of success? Even Nicole (Melissa Benoist) is judged with the same metric.

Cuts and lacerations become nothing but inconveniences; he will bleed for this. And then he’ll do it again. As he grows increasingly obsessed, his alienation becomes chronic, retreating deeper and deeper into himself: his need to survive the cut-throat world of competitive music seems to have left him almost insane. Surrounded by arrogance and opportunism, he soon exhibits the same loathsome qualities. He’ll seize a chance to prove he’s the best, showing up his cohorts. Once he’s had his chance to prove it, he’ll stop at nothing to ensure a chance isn’t given to anyone else.

10 years removed from his audacious debut, Whiplash remains Chazelle’s crowning achievement. It towers over both his much-overrated La La Land (2016) and the much-underrated First Man (2019). While he may have snagged the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ for the former, becoming the youngest person in history to do so at a mere 32, it was a prize that Barry Jenkins more richly deserved for the sublime Moonlight (2016).

Chazelle’s direction in this film is superb, but he perhaps deserves greater credit for writing such a taut, mesmerising psychological drama. The narrative structure in this film is perfect: just like a good jazz set, it’s never too fast nor too slow, oscillating between the two rhythms seemingly effortlessly.

It’s ironic, then, that Whiplash was only written as an in-between project as Chazelle tried to secure funding for his passion project, La La Land. This mirrors another instance when a throw-away project went on to receive far more adulation than the original idea. When Luc Besson failed to find financial backing for his ambitious sci-fi epic The Fifth Element (1997), he wrote and directed Leon (1994) as an inexpensive side-project, which went on to experience much greater critical and commercial success.

As commendable as Chazelle’s writing and directing are, it’s Miles Teller who steals the show. Though he was unjustifiably snubbed at the Oscars (not even receiving a nomination), it’s one of the best performances of the 21st-century. He demonstrates both the terrible fragility of a lonely teenager and the over-powering ambition of a self-aggrandising narcissist, moving from one to the other with the drop of a hat. He’s spellbinding in this showing, and it’s one of the few performances that I never tire of watching.

Similarly, J.K Simmons’ turn as the tyrannical Fletcher is a singular role. He transitions from the assuring confidant to an abusive psychopath in an unnervingly believable way. While some of his tirades threaten to become excessive at times, I remind myself that I’ve encountered such unhinged artists; when I think back on how unprepared I was to deal with their emotional mood swings, Simmons’ rendition of a cruel authority figure never falters. Moreover, few actors have made four words as frightening: “Not quite my tempo…”

Amidst all of his screaming and epithet-laden rants, Simmons manages to bring a nuance to the character that prevents him from becoming cartoonish. He’s not solely a fastidious perfectionist, nor an abusive tyrant (though these are inarguably the two traits that define him best). There is more to him than that. Underneath it all, I think that Fletcher’s a lonely, troubled soul, just as tormented as Andrew. It’s for that reason that he can spot potential greatness in people so easily: he tortures others because he tortures himself. Reminiscing on a time when he first met a struggling student, he solemnly says: “I saw a drive in him…”

Furthermore, editor Tom Cross ties the film together superlatively, creating order out of the chaos of jazz. His editing expertly captures the hustle and bustle of the music industry. Additionally, the feeling of being in a jazz orchestra is wonderfully conveyed through a frenetic and hectic cutting to and from different performers, with mere milliseconds spent on a single image before we switch again.

Whiplash is a film that has become an instant classic. This assertion is proven by the fact it recently topped a poll formed by filmmakers and critics, asking to select the best films ever to have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival. When your peers think you’re besting the likes of Blood Simple (1984), Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Memento (2000), Primer (2004), Boyhood (2014), and Get Out (2017), then you’re doing something right.

The film has one of the best endings in recent memory. It’s a shockingly powerful denouement: pushed to the limit, Andrew decides he has further to go still. He’s plunged a bloody fist into a jug of icy water countless times—he won’t falter now. When he walks back onstage and defiantly picks up his drumsticks, it’s a demand for attention after years of neglect, a cry to be accepted after countless rejections. It’s an obstinate refusal to be denied—even in the face of his tyrant. The audience is captivated. Ultimately, his colleagues themselves turn around, astounded. The bassist who chastised him onstage has been thrown into stunned silence, eyes wide, taking in Andrew’s performance with a look mingled both with concern and awe.

Andrew will never take comfort in his father’s forgiving affection; it’s stained with mediocrity. As he watches from backstage, Jim realises that he has well and truly lost his son… a look of horrified despair is etched all over his face. Conversely, Fletcher grins broadly, realising that his monster has finally been animated: he has brought a seminal artist to life. Is the ending triumphant or tragic?

There’s a mist of battle in his final performance, sweat hanging in the air, floating with the notes from his chaotic showcase. The pain, anger, and trauma of a lonely artist, plagued by self-doubt and naysayers, leaves it all out there in one prolonged solo. Andrew channels years of pent-up rage, his frustration at having been forgotten, and his agony of being ostracised and alienated, all into a single piece that threatens to break both his body and his drum set.

A boy abandoned by his mother, doubted by his father, he’s now a crazed machine, lost in one perfect moment that he’ll never capture again. And he will leave it all out there. All of it. Everything he has, until he’s hollowed himself out, and shown the entire world what exists inside him. Until his tools have been stained with blood, with sweat, and with tears, countless times. Then, and only then, might he be free of his ambition. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

USA | 2014 | 106 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

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Cast & Crew

director: Damien Chazelle.
writer: Damien Chazelle (based on his own 2013 short film).
starring: Miles Teller, J.K Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist, Austin Stowell, Nate Lang & Chris Mulkey.