His hero on the drums (insert prejudiced jokes about drummers being people who hang around with musicians if you must) is Buddy Rich, the Miles Davis of the skins, the Charlie Parker of percussion, the Buddy Rich of Buddy Richness.
He likes a girl and tells her so. He gets picked to worked with the most awesome and terrifyingly demanding tutor, Terrence Fletcher, played with unreadable genius by J.K. Simmonds. He begins to realise that the greats become great by paying in blood, sweat, toil and tears. Like literally. What with the blisters on his hands constantly splurging blood everywhere and Fletcher screaming at him, throwing chairs around and even slapping him in the face, the relationship between master and prodigy is as dark and destructive as that seen in Black Swan.
Writer and director Damien Chazelle clearly knows his music (and has just swept all before him with record breaking Golden Globes wins for his follow-up, La La Land). The language of the practise room and the references to jazz icons are authentic down to the finest details. It's not necessary for the audience to understand the lingo or know about the lives of the icons but Chazelle wants it known he can geek out on this stuff all day.
The abusive treatment Fletcher metes out to Andrew and the other members of the band leads inevitably to his downfall. Andrew flips his wig during a live performance and physically attacks the tutor. He's expelled and winds up working in a deli. Fletcher doesn't last much longer either as, with the help of Andrew's testimony, the parents of a previous student who hung himself as a result of anxiety and depression quite probably caused by Fletcher's methods, bring a lawsuit to prevent anyone else having to go through the same personal hell.
Some months later Andrew and Fletcher meet again, in a dark and dingy jazz bar, and make some kind of reconciliation with one another. Fletcher admits he drove his students hard but does not regret it, arguing that great musicians always use such brickbats to improve to the point of true greatness. He asks Andrew to drum for his new band who are performing for a prestigious audience in a few days. The set list is all from the racks Andrew sweated and strained over at Schafer.
Except one of them isn't. Come the night, in front of the crowd, Fletcher wants to humiliate Andrew whom he knows testified against him. He introduces a song Andrew's never played and the band fall apart around the scrambled drumming. The kid walks out, only to come back again (greats don't quit, right?) and take over the band, leading them in the tracks they were supposed to be playing, and driving them with the best playing of his young life. At the end of the first number he solos Buddy Rich style, eventually winning Fletcher back over - the mentor begins conducting the solo as though it had been the performance plan all along.
In your face bastard tutor. Up yours inferiority complex. Boom crash bang paradiddle wild kick drum a wop bop a loo bop...hmm, this last is rock and roll, sorry.
Pretty much a two hander, like a tightly-scripted stage play, Whiplash is as emotionally taut as a snare drum, as brutal as the pounding of a double bass pedal. Simmonds and Teller are note perfect in their performances, the supporting cast are subtle and smart enough not to get in the way of those performances.
Basically me likey, man. I'm solid gone.
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