Damien Chazelle’s ‘Whiplash’ will shake you to your core

There are music films. There are thrillers. And then there’s Whiplash. To call writer-director Damien Chazelle’s multi-award-winning film “unique” would be a gross understatement. It is, for lack of a better word, groundbreaking. It is, along with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, one of the three 2014 American films that have a legitimate chance of changing cinema for the better, while being marvellously entertaining as they do. A magnificent two-hander between Miles Teller as enthusiastic young jazz drummer Andrew and J.K. Simmons as monstrous teacher Fletcher, Chazelle’s film is a non-stop 100-minute assault on the senses, but one that will educate, exhilarate and at every level impress every member of its audience. Between Chazelle’s smart, witty script and mesmerising visual techniques, Whiplash is as electrifying and hypnotic as the classic jazz its characters adore. Teller gives, by a wide margin, his best performance to date as Andrew, a first-year student at a prestigious New York music school who, in his attempts to join the most significant jazz group in the college, is forced to bear the wrath of Simmons’ Fletcher. Fletcher could easily have been written and played as a one-dimensional rage beast, but the always-superb Simmons brings an incomparable level of depth to the role, and his ultra-masculine physical stance is balanced brilliantly against the smallish and youthful but extremely ambitious Andrew. A moment in one of the film’s final scenes in which the two actors have a wordless psychological battle across a stage, all in one take, using only conducting gestures- for Simmons- and the drums- for Teller- is one of the year’s finest cinematic moments and rivals anything in Birdman.

Chazelle could easily have focused on his two leads and failed to give supporting characters a second thought, but Glee’s Melissa Benoist and Paul Reiser are both wholly believable as Andrew’s short-lived girlfriend and loving father, and bring the necessary humanity to a story that is- in essence- about two possible sociopaths. Simply because Fletcher is doling out the violence doesn’t in any way mean Andrew isn’t an equally troubled character. His desperation to succeed causes him to put himself in extremely dangerous situations, and although he isn’t half as selfish and distant as Nightcrawler’s fame-obsessed Lou Bloom, Andrew is without a doubt an antihero. There are many modern American films which can move their audience, charm their audience and entertain their audience, but it takes legitimate talent to shake your audience to their core, and- without the use of any clichés, cheap propaganda or sentimentality- inspire them. Whiplash does all this, and more.