Editor’s Note: this week, local theaters will be presenting a tenth anniversary reissue of “Whiplash”, featuring an Oscar-winning performance by J. K. Simmons as an impossibly harsh music teacher. It was the first film by Damien Chazelle, who went on to make “La La Land.” The Buffalo Hive is republishing M. Faust’s original, 2014 review. It was published in the (no longer operating) publication “The Public.” Consult The Buffalo Hive’s Film Focus for showtimes.

By M. Faust

Remember the ending of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” when an exhausted Ringo Starr yells “I got blisters on my fingers”? For 19-year-old student drummer Andrew (Miles Teller), blisters are the point at which he’s just warming up. By the time he finishes practicing, he has to wipe blood off his kit. 

It is Andrew’s ambition to be a great jazz drummer. He is studying at an elite Manhattan conservatory, and when he attracts the attention of the school’s top teacher, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), he thinks he’s on his way. Little does he know that his struggle has just begun. 

Dressed all in black, Fletcher doesn’t so much enter rooms as explode into them. The musicians in his band, presumably the crème of the school’s crème, look down when he does, afraid to make eye contact. And with good reason: when he’s down on a performance, any personal qualities of the player are open for verbal abuse. His justification is that players have to be pushed beyond what they think their limits are to be the best that they can be. 

If that reminds you of a military cliché, Whiplash takes its cues less from movies about foreboding professors like The Paper Chase than it does from An Officer and a Gentleman. At least that’s how it seems at first, until Fletcher’s relentless goading of his student starts to remind you more of R. Lee Ermy in Full Metal Jacket. And we all remember what happened to recruit Vincent D’Onofrio in that movie. 

Writer-director Damien Chazelle’s screenplay was inspired by his own experiences as a conservatory student. In the press notes, he recalls “My journey as a drummer culminated in national honors and awards, but I can still vividly recall the nightmares, the nausea and skipped meals, the days of unmanageable anxiety—all in the service of a style of music that is, on its surface, all about freedom and joy.” 

I’m not a jazz buff, but many who are have complained that Whiplash is implausible as a depiction of music education. I don’t think it’s meant to be. Depicting Fletcher as a bully pushing his student to impossible ends (and in so doing providing the role of a lifetime for Simmons), Chazelle is clearly exaggerating in order to ask the question, How far is too far in pursuit of the vague idea of “greatness”? 

Not to give away anything, but Chazelle doesn’t press his young character to Full Metal Jacket extremes. Instead, he concocts a finale that contains an unlikely plot twist and which arguably counters everything the rest of the film has warned us about. But it includes a musical performance so dazzling and exhilarating that it’s hard to complain. (To the best of my knowledge the young actor Teller does all of his own drum work.)  If it were artistically honest the movie wouldn’t end this way. But I can’t say I’m not glad it did.

M. Faust is a veteran movie writer and a regular contributor to the Buffalo Hive.