A jazz drumming student, a tyrannical teacher, a Sundance prize, and one of the great debut features of the 21st century.
Andrew Neiman is a nineteen-year-old jazz drumming student at Shaffer Conservatory, the most prestigious music school in the country. Terence Fletcher conducts the school's studio band, the highest tier of the programme. Fletcher's teaching method involves screaming, throwing chairs, and humiliation as a tool for finding the next Charlie Parker.
Andrew is pulled into Fletcher's band. He practises until his hands bleed. He breaks up with his girlfriend. He drives to a competition with a fractured arm. He gets out of a car accident and walks into a venue to play and almost dies. The film's two-hour relationship between Andrew and Fletcher is one of the most psychologically detailed mentor-student studies American cinema has produced.
Whiplash was Damien Chazelle's second film and first proper feature. He had originally written the script as a half-hour short to demonstrate the concept; the short won at Sundance 2013; the feature won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize the next year. Two years after that, Chazelle won Best Director for La La Land.
The film is technically remarkable. It runs 106 minutes and has the propulsion of a thriller. Tom Cross's editing — he won the Oscar — uses the rhythms of the drumming itself to structure cuts. The final ten-minute Caravan sequence is among the most virtuosic editing in recent American cinema.
Simmons won Best Supporting Actor for a performance that, on first viewing, seems to be doing one thing — terrorising — but on rewatching reveals significant range. The bookmarking quiet scenes (Fletcher at his daughter's recital, Fletcher meeting Andrew years later in a bar) establish that the character is, in his own framework, performing a moral act.
The film does not let Fletcher off the hook. Late in the film, a former student of his has committed suicide. Fletcher's reaction — bristling defensiveness, then a public lie about the cause of death — is the film's clearest verdict on his methods. The film also does not simplify him into pure villainy. The friction is the point.
The film's final ten minutes are a single performance of Caravan during which Andrew, against Fletcher's expectations, plays a drum solo of escalating complexity until the band collapses around him and Fletcher, finally, smiles. The film ends on the smile.
Audiences and critics have argued about whether the ending is triumphant or tragic. Has Andrew become the great drummer Fletcher promised? Or has he sacrificed everything that wasn't drumming, leaving Fletcher's worldview vindicated at the cost of Andrew's life? Chazelle has been asked about this in interviews and has consistently refused to answer. The film, he has said, is the answer.