10 / 10
Not Quite My Tempo
Andrew Neiman is a first-year drummer at the Shaffer Conservatory in New York, the best music school in the country, and he wants to be great. Not good. Great, the kind of great people remember, like Buddy Rich. Terence Fletcher, who runs the school’s top jazz band, hears him practising late one night and invites him in.
Then Fletcher throws a chair at his head. He slaps him across the face, over and over, making him count whether he’s rushing or dragging. He screams obscenities at him in front of the whole band, mocks his family and reduces him to tears. It’s the first rehearsal. It gets worse.
Whiplash is about what a man will do to himself, and let somebody do to him, to become the best. It never tells you whether it was worth it. It just shows you the bill.
J.K. Simmons
Simmons won the Oscar for this, and I can’t think of a supporting award that was ever more deserved. Fletcher is dressed all in black, shaved head, arms like a boxer, and he stands in front of the band like a sergeant in front of recruits. When he raises his hand for silence, the room stops breathing.
What makes him terrifying is that he’s not simply a sadist. He’s brilliant. He hears everything. He genuinely believes the world is full of mediocre musicians because teachers are too soft. He thinks the only way to find the next Charlie Parker is to push until somebody breaks or somebody becomes a legend. He tells a story about Jo Jones throwing a cymbal at Parker’s head, and he believes every word.
There’s a scene where Fletcher tears up telling the band about a former student who died. For a moment you think you’re seeing the human being underneath. Then you find out what he wasn’t telling them, and you realise you’ve been played too.
For Writers
Fletcher tells the band a tearful story about a former student, and for a moment the audience softens toward him. Later we learn what he left out, and the story turns into another manipulation. Chazelle uses the audience’s sympathy as a weapon, the same way Fletcher uses Andrew’s.
If you’ve got a villain, give them one moment where the reader almost likes them. Make it sincere on the surface, and make sure it serves the villain’s agenda underneath. When the reader finds out, they’ll feel what the victim feels: that they’ve been had. That shared betrayal binds the reader to your protagonist better than any description of how cruel the villain is. Writing Heroes and Villains covers this well.
Miles Teller
Miles Teller plays Andrew, and he does most of his own drumming, and by the finale his hands are bleeding into the kit for real, or near enough that you can’t tell. Andrew isn’t a nice kid. He’s arrogant, he dumps his girlfriend because she’ll get in the way of his career, and he sneers at his relatives at a family dinner. Teller doesn’t ask you to like him. He asks you to understand the hunger.
The dinner scene is brilliant and ugly. His cousins are college football players and everybody at the table treats sports as the only achievement that counts. Andrew tears into them. He’s right, and he’s also an insufferable little prick, and Teller plays both at once.
A War Movie
Damien Chazelle shoots Whiplash like combat. The rehearsal room is a bunker. The band sits in rows like soldiers waiting for orders. The editing, by Tom Cross, cuts to the snap of a snare and the flick of a cymbal like gunfire, and it won the Oscar. So did the sound. You hear every stick hitting every drum, and you feel it in your teeth.
Chazelle had been a drummer in a high school jazz band with a teacher who scared the hell out of him, and you can feel that fear in every frame. He made this on a small budget, shot it in about three weeks, and he was still in his twenties. It won the top prize and the audience award at Sundance, and it made his career. La La Land came next.
There’s no fat on this film at all. It runs a little over a hundred minutes and every scene either ratchets the pressure up or shows you what the pressure is costing.
For Writers
The film is edited like a war movie, cuts landing on the snare and the cymbal, rehearsals staged like drills. A music drama borrowed another genre’s grammar, and that gives it a violence no concert film has.
When your story feels flat, try telling it in the grammar of a different genre. Write a family dinner like a hostage negotiation. Write a job interview like a boxing match. The subject stays the same, but the rhythm, the stakes and the tension all change, and readers feel the difference before they can name it. It’s one of the quickest ways to rescue a scene that’s technically fine and dead on the page, and it costs you nothing but a rewrite.
The Car Crash
Andrew is late for a competition because his bus breaks down. He rents a car, races to the venue, realises he’s left his sticks at the rental office, races back, and on the way to the show a truck slams into him. He crawls out of the wreck, bleeding, and runs to the stage. He tries to play. His hands won’t work. Fletcher stops the performance and tells him he’s done.
Andrew attacks him in front of the audience. He’s expelled. It’s the lowest point in the film, and it’s also the moment you realise how completely this kid has lost the plot. He’d rather die on that stage than miss the solo.
The Final Nine Minutes
Months later, Andrew has quit drumming. He’s testified, anonymously, about Fletcher’s abuse, and Fletcher has been fired. They run into each other at a jazz club. Fletcher is gentle, almost friendly. He invites Andrew to play with his new band at a big festival. Andrew says yes.
On stage, Fletcher leans over and tells him he knows who testified. Then he calls a tune Andrew has never seen, with no sheet music, to humiliate him in front of every scout in the room. Andrew walks off. Then he walks back on, sits down, and starts playing Caravan before Fletcher can stop him, and takes over the band.
What follows is the most intense stretch of music I know of in any film. Andrew plays a solo that goes on and on, beyond sense, beyond the arrangement, with Fletcher first furious, then stunned, then leaning in and conducting him, the two of them locked together. The film cuts to black on a look between them. You never find out what it cost.
For Writers
The final nine minutes have almost no dialogue. It’s a drum solo, two faces and a band watching. Everything the film has been building toward is settled in music and looks.
Don’t resolve your climax with a speech. By the time you reach the end, the reader knows your characters well enough to read them from what they do. Strip every line of dialogue out of your final scene, write only actions and reactions, and see how much stronger it gets. If the scene collapses without the talking, the problem is earlier in the book, in the chapters that were supposed to teach the reader who these people are. Go back and fix those first. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on writing dialogue that works.
Was It Worth It?
The ending is triumphant, and it’s horrifying. Andrew has become great, maybe. He’s also become somebody who’ll accept any abuse to get there, and Fletcher has been proved right in the worst possible way. Chazelle doesn’t tell you what to think. Some people walk out cheering. Some walk out sick. Both are the right reaction.
I’ve worked with enough talented, driven people to know this obsession is real, and to know how often it eats the person alive. Whiplash doesn’t glamorise it and it doesn’t condemn it. It just shows you the whole thing, blood and all.
It’s the best film ever made about the price of excellence, and it’ll make your palms sweat every time.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Whiplash never answers its own question. It sets out to ask whether greatness is worth the abuse it takes to get there, shows you the answer in blood, and cuts to black before anybody can say whether it was worth it.
An ending that refuses to rule on the story’s central question can be more powerful than one that answers it, as long as the question has been dramatised so fully that the reader can’t help answering it themselves.
Write down your story’s central question in one sentence. Then check your ending. If it answers the question for the reader, ask whether leaving it open would hit harder.
Rushing or Dragging?
Hell, yes. It’s a 10: the most intense film about music ever made, J.K. Simmons at his most frightening and a final nine minutes nobody forgets. Watch it with the sound turned up, and don’t expect to relax afterwards.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists