Watching Whiplash, the story of the antagonistic relationship between a drumming prodigy and his ferociously demanding conservatory music teacher, almost the last thing on your mind is music. Although almost three-quarters of the film moves to the sound of drums, the images in one’s mind veer more towards drill sergeant movies, sports flicks and cult initiation rites. It could as well be called Squarebash as Whiplash, so often does the relationship between JK Simmons’s unforgiving professor and Miles Teller’s whimpering pupil resemble that between R Lee Ermey’s splenetic Marine Corps drill instructor and Vincent D’Onofrio’s useless grunt in the opening act of Full Metal Jacket, or John Wayne and his raw recruits in Sands Of Iwo Jima. As a teacher-pupil movie, this is the anti-Dead Poets Society, or Death To Miss Jean Brodie.
When I did think of music, I was put more in mind of the circumstances under which Captain Beefheart drilled and abused his Magic Band during the year-long creation of Trout Mask Replica, an atmosphere redolent of a Manson-esque cult of personality manipulation and forced disintegration of the ego. And Simmons, for me, most closely resembles the legendary jazz drummer and bandleader Buddy Rich (one of Whiplash’s touchstone figures) in that famous secret recording made of him relentlessly berating his musicians aboard their tour bus after a show: “Everybody can hear your fuckin’ clams out there! If I hear one fuckin’ clam from anybody, you’ve had it! One clam and this whole fuckin’ band is through!”
Simmons does a lot of shouting, hurls a lot of homophobic abuse around under a mild sprinkling of anti-semitic bile, flings chairs and music stands around the rehearsal room and even slaps Teller across the face a number of times, before sneering when he cries, “Aw, are you one of those single-tear people?” In his gangsterish, Putin-bodyguard all-black duds and looking very lizardly under his Mr Clean bald dome, Simmons is the movie’s engine, locked in claustrophobic conflict with his pupil like two boxers in the ring. According to the gathering consensus in Tinseltown, his showy but obvious performance is a shoo-in for this year’s best supporting actor.
But all of Simmons’s sound and fury would be as nothing were he not facing off against Teller, the single most interesting new young male actor of the last couple of years. Although he’s young at 27, Teller’s face bears the scars of a car-wreck when he was 20, and they add an extra dimension to his acting that his apple-cheeked peers can’t match. It’s an old-young face with an old-school tough-guy beauty, like Steve Cochran’s or Robert Ryan’s. On top of that, the kid can really act and swagger and suffer. I can’t wait till he’s 50 and playing villains.
Whiplash is in UK cinemas on 16 January
