Whiplash

Whiplash clefts music from dance, love and spirituality. What's left is muscle, red and raw, beating faster and faster against a drum.

That's how Damien Chazelle's beautiful but troubling film begins: 19-year-old Andrew (Miles Teller) is practicing jazz drumming in a dark room of a New York conservatory, heralded as "the nation's best." Conductor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) happens upon him and invites him to join the school's top band. A battle of egos and tempos ensues, as Andrew must decide how much of himself and his sanity he's willing to give to music. Pulling him in the other direction, albeit briefly, is Nicole (Melissa Benoist), a Fordham student he's dating. But she's less of a character than a symbol of the normal life Andrew could be leading.

Whiplash is not just an overtly masculine film—it's a film about the male body. Fletcher tortures his students physically and emotionally, and Andrew spends much of the movie dripping with sweat and bleeding from his hands as his teacher hurls insults and objects at him. Some critics have pointed out that Whiplash is similar to a sports movie. They're mistaken. Insofar as sports are contests of physical performance, this is a sports movie.

But while meaning in sports movies comes from the implicit worth of winning and losing, the value of music is not so neat. Chazelle tries to make it so, by grounding the film in Andrew's approach to music—he's determined to be a legend on par with Buddy Rich and Charlie Parker. Any good sports movie bucks against this kind of all-or-nothing approach. In Friday Night Lights, there's a scene in which a scout asks the star quarterback if he likes football. The question shocks him, hitting at the pleasureless fervor with which he and his teammates play. No such revelation comes in Whiplash. Andrew's motivation remains a mystery. The film relies instead on an appreciation of technical perfection for its own sake. Which is strange, considering that jazz, as a genre, tends to value improvisation and experimentation.

When it comes to the film's sound, though, this preoccupation with technique serves Chazelle well, and the music in Whiplash is altered and edited to underscore dramatic moments. It's visually rich, too, from the golden browns of Fletcher's studio to the sick greens of nocturnal Manhattan. Equally impressive is Teller's close-to-the-chest performance. Anyone can act a ham, but it takes a special ability to play a quiet weirdo. Though Andrew spends most of the movie looking like a dog with its tail between its legs, he occasionally flies into a solipsistic rage. Simmons' performance lacks such range. His Fletcher is certainly horrifying, but you've heard these hardass lines before.

And here's where Whiplash is most troubling: It views the abusive instructor as a necessary evil for creating great art. This flies in the face not just of morality but of history. There's no single path to artistic greatness. John Coltrane honed his chops while cleaning kitchens for the Navy. The Velvet Underground wrote influential music in between heroin nods. At Andrew's age, Tchaikovsky was preparing for a life in the civil service. Whiplash is certainly an affecting film, but taking it as anything more than a portrait of a single student-teacher relationship would be a mistake.

Critic's Grade: B+

SEE IT: Whiplash is rated R. It opens Friday at Fox Tower.

WWeek 2015