Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons go head to head in Whiplash.

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Andrew, the young jazz drummer at the center of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s thrilling Whiplash, is, to use the clinical term, a major dick.

Certain of his own considerable talent, he is self-centered, brusque, sometimes cruel. Knowing that considerable talent is not enough, he pushes himself to physical and emotional extremes to reach the next level (and the next) — a drive that further amplifies his self-centeredness, brusqueness and cruelty.

And he’s the good guy in Whiplash, one of the year’s best movies.

We know this because Andrew is played by Miles Teller, a 27-year-old actor with a gift (also on display in last year’s The Spectacular Now) for wringing charm out of characters who in real life would count few friends. Few actors in Teller’s class can make a three-scene romance count the way he does here: a shy ask-out, a winning first date and then a Vicomte de Valmont–style breakup, each an understandable (if not sympathetic) part of this character.

We also know this because Andrew has a nemesis, introduced in the movie’s dreamlike first scene. Fletcher, a revered instructor and bandleader at the very Juilliard-y fictional conservatory where Andrew is trying to make his name, is self-important, elaborately profane and perhaps criminally abusive. There are some who will tell you that perfection is unattainable. Fletcher knows otherwise, and he demands it roughly like Deadwood‘s Al Swearengen threatening a rival.

But Fletcher isn’t the bad guy in Whiplash. Not quite. We know this because Fletcher is played by J.K. Simmons, the immediately recognizable character actor who can do sweet (the dad in Juno) as believably as he can do horrifying (the white supremacist in the old HBO series Oz) and who is never two-dimensional. And we know this because Andrew clearly needs chair-throwing, lie-telling, breakdown-inducing Fletcher. (Fletcher repeats, more than once, the legend about Jo Jones hurling a cymbal at Charlie Parker’s head to shame the sax player into doing better; Jones threw it at Bird’s feet, if he did it at all. But Simmons is flawless in the telling.)

So, yes, Whiplash is a contest of wills, and it seems clear enough who is wrong when we’re watching Andrew and Fletcher clash. But the real tension at work is Andrew versus Andrew — a testament to the agonies of self-discipline that Teller plays to perfection. (The actor also does his own drumming and is beyond merely convincing.) We watch him practice fundamentals until his hands bleed, praying that the next single-stroke roll is the one that brings transcendence. And we watch him as he figures out that Fletcher’s savage insistence on his way — his tempo, his time — might be the drummer’s only way to fulfillment.

There’s something of the Rocky movie to Whiplash — who among athletes but a boxer seems as brutal and alone as a drummer? — and it’s not without sweaty workouts and a dramatic showdown. But Chazelle’s film, though it guides you toward wanting a big victory, purposely lacks the discovery of moral principle that girds even the more brooding entertainments about sport.

Whiplash is closer to a battlefield drama. Andrew isn’t trying to throw a knockout. He’s trying to kill that 7/4 time signature before it kills him. It’s a kind of music-school noir (shot dark and deep by Sharone Meir and edited with rhythmic certainty by Tom Cross), set to snapping snares and ringing toms and hissing cymbals (the music is by Justin Hurwitz, give or take Hank Levy’s title song and another classic, Duke Ellington’s “Caravan”) the way a war movie is set to machine-gun fire. When we learn of an offscreen death, there is the sense that casualties are expected, even necessary. Some settle for greatness rather than risking everything to be, for a few bars, perfect. The way must be cleared.