His pupil-victim now has to master Hank Levy’s complex piece Whiplash, with its freaky 7/4 and 14/8 time signatures: the title acquires an awful additional significance. The film’s very first scene shows him hammering out a solo and something in it catches the ear of Fletcher, who capriciously interrupts this practice and instantly starts playing mind games with Andrew. He has an intense dedication to nurturing his own world-beating talent and status, which makes him emotionally vulnerable to attack. Andrew has a closed, unresponsive expression, as if his whole being has been swallowed inward in concentration and absorption. He meets his match, or possibly his ideal pupil, in the form of Andrew, a would-be jazz drummer played with self-possession and flair by Miles Teller. Jazz is taught here with the same uncompromising formal severity as Bach, and Fletcher looks quite as messed up as Isabelle Huppert’s imperious Erika in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. You might think that jazz is all about freedom, relaxation and letting it all hang out. Writer-director Damien Chazelle shows how Fletcher’s music and his attitude embody from the outset a fundamental dissonance. Fletcher is played with bullish, pop-eyed belligerence by JK Simmons, wearing black jeans and black T-shirt of a style that was cool for youngsters in Fletcher’s own distant youth: weirdly, he looks like an ageing version of the gay teen hipster in Clueless. Fletcher insists on the highest standards, and woe betide any student who lets him down by so much as a millimetre: he will berate and humiliate such a person like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. For me, it revived (happy) memories of testy Mr Shorofsky and frizzy-haired Bruno Martelli in Fame.Īt the film’s centre is Mr Fletcher, a terrifying jazz teacher at a top New York academy he is also the conductor of an elite student band, whose competition recitals are attended by the top talent scouts. Where does a teacher’s inspirational discipline and provocation cross the line into abuse? There is some thrilling classroom brutality and operatic dysfunction, though Whiplash perhaps jazz-drums itself into a bit of a corner. You marvel at the flash, the crash, the technique – and finally wonder where exactly it is all going, and when and how it is going to end. Watching this film is like listening to a very extended, bravura jazz drum solo. Whiplash is a study in the misery and cruelty that’s always involved in teaching a musical instrument at the highest level: it’s outrageously watchable, very well acted, slightly preposterous, and nowhere near as desperately important as it thinks it is. That’s the Dr Lecter, incidentally, who kills and eats a flautist in the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra for being out of tune. If Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg took jazz drumming lessons from Dr Hannibal Lecter, the result might look like this.
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