Musicians: Whiplash (Dir Damien Chazelle,, 1h46m, 2014)

Damien Chazelle is no stranger to this column; very long-time readers will remember my delight at his musical, La La Land (2017) being a musical I actually liked, whilst his follow up feature, First Man sloughed off its slow-moving portrait of Neil Armstrong in its final, spectacular act, as the director went beat-for-beat through the Apollo 11 landing. Chazelle's films, on the whole, consider performers, musicians in particular, from his first feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) onwards, to Babylon (2022)'s dramatic depiction of the birth of Hollywood, Nowhere is this seen better than in Chazelle's arrival in cinema, in the form of Whiplash, in which Miles Tellers' up and coming student does battle with the abusive and controlling figure of J. K. Simmons' teacher.

We've already considered, across every film this season, the nature of failure: Llewyn is going nowhere, Brian Slade has awoken a generation, but at the cost of his own career, and much of This Is Spinal Tap's comedy is in its titular group not realising they're past it.  Films about musicians are as much about failure as success; we are drawn into tales such as 2022's Tár, where a self-destructive conductor spirals out of control, Last Days (2003) in which Gus Van Zant follows a reclusive, Cobain-esque figure, Sound of Metal (2022) in which Riz Ahmed's heavy metal drummer battles hearing loss, and atop them all, Amadeus (1984), in which Salieri watches on from the wings to the rise and fall of Mozart. 

Even those films that do not concentrate on the downfall of musicians often focus on their hardships, their struggles to be the best in their field, often against adversity or their fellow musicians. This, Whiplash hones to perfection, drawing on Chazelle's own time at high school as a jazz drummer to portray a vicious, ruthless, and highly pressurised environment in which Andrew Neiman (Teller) must seemingly succeed or be a nobody. Plucked from a practice room by Terence Fletcher (Simmons), into Simmons' Studio Band, so Neiman is soon drawn into a single-minded world of brutal practice - there are more than a few shots where DoP Sharone Meir focuses on bloodied sticks, bandaged hands, spattered drum-heads, and an ever more high-tension battle of wits with Fletcher.

Whiplash is a perfect double-handed, a film that balances its two leads perfectly: Teller's performance as Neiman is quasi-autobiographical, Teller, like Chazelle, began drumming as a teen, but it is Neiman's ambition, his ruthlessness -there's at least one moment where the young man deliberately or otherwise sabotages his rivals for First chair - his single-mindedness that runs much of the film. Neiman wants, nay, needs to be something, idolising jazz musicians, in particular Charlie Parker, people that, when with his girlfriend, Nicole (Melissa Benoist), another person pushed aside in his ceaseless ambition, draws nothing but a blank. We see this ambition, stoked by Fletcher, rise to the surface, over and over; scenes with Neiman's father (Paul Reiser) becoming more distant, Meir holding on phones where unanswered messages build up. 

This determination's dark side boils over in a brutal car-crash that's as brusing as anything else on screen, and a bloodied, injured Neiman's temper finally boiling over. There is, for all the demolition of the idea of prodigy, of the cinematic depiction of hard work, conveyed in the drumming scenes, where Tom Cross's editing and Justin Hurwitz's score are at their strongest - and where Teller is largely playing for real - a decidedly self-destructive streak to Neiman. There is, as his relatives point out, an innate self-destuction to the jazz performer, with Parker dying in his thirties, and this danger to this drive of being the best, that only grows across the film, the car-crash merely punctuating rather than ending Neiman's self-destructive behaviour, evcn as its tragic consequences are played out in the death of another student.

At the centre of this is Simmons as Fletcher. This may be a career-best for the actor, such is the venom and utter cruelty he metes out in the form of 'education' for his students - Meir shoots him like the villain of a horror movie, stalking across shot, the costume blacks and greys, a relentless monster that bullies and belittles his students. The first attack on the unforunate Neiman, upgraded to the first chair by Fletcher is as sudden and ferocious as it is brutal, a sudden crash of a chair thrown across the room, as the teacher repeatedly cuts off and corrects his student, before slapping him repeatedly. Never have a raised fist and the words "Not quite my tempo" been so terrifying but Fletcher makes us fear the mere sight and sound of these words and makes us fear for Neiman, and his other pupils. 

There is the sense of Jekyll and Hyde to Fletcher - we see him later at a jazz club, and in the company of one of his friend's daughter, exhibit a gentleness that is lacking elsewhere, but this is arguably letting a vicious bully of a man off the hook - there is no contrition, no warmth to Fletcher. For Neiman there is only Simmons unveilling more and more of the dark underbelly of Fletcher's style of teaching, driving a young man that he believes can be truly great onward to success or his own self-destruction. He is driven solely by his belief that his "methods" could create someone truly great, and this singleminded pursuit of drives a titanic performance that earned Simmons an Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Fletcher is one of the most frightening non-horror villains in cinema, and Simmons nails his entire character from start to finish.

Whiplash, thus, turns into a battle of wits, and a self-destructive one at that; from this sequence onwards, the entire film becomes locked into it, for better or ill, and one could read warnings of abusive behaviour, of would-be prodigies pushed beyond their limits, and myriad other themes that pool beneath Whiplash's surface. There is certainly nothing healthy about this relationship, and Chazelle is careful to avoid a denoument - and what a denoument, placing this battle of wits out in the open - where either moral is triumphant, but something more nuanced, and arguably more frightening to the bystander, emerges. 

Rarely has a film about music felt at tense, as frightening, especially in its depiction of success at any odds, but  above all, Whiplash remains a superb, tautly made battle of wits across the battleground of music, dominated by the performes of Teller and Simmons. 

Rating: Highly Recommended

Whiplash is available via DVD and BluRay from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and on streaming on AppleTV

Next week, and indeed next month, to animation, beginning with The Wild Robot.