A "Music Movie" that manages to get everything about music completely wrong.

Rating: 1/10 (15 April 2017)

As a professional musician of 20 years, I would like to say a little something about this movie and it's odd "message". (or lack thereof...)
Becoming a great musician takes years and years of hard work and a lot of sacrifice. However, the real process, in real life, looks NOTHING like this movie. The idea that a mentally unstable, psychotically aggressive and (perhaps worst of all) completely INCONSISTENT teacher/mentor like the Fletcher character would be of any actual use to an aspiring musician is pure garbage. It might make for great "drama", but it does not reflect how things work in the real world at all.
What saddens me is the thought that young aspiring musicians might watch this drivel and think it's an accurate portrayal of what it is to be a "great" musician and what you have to do to achieve that greatness. Or even worse, that some aspiring teacher might watch this and be "inspired" to follow Fletcher's method of "teaching by terror" because of the results it achieves in the movie.
In reality "Fletcher's method" is flawed. It will not create "a new Charlie Parker". It will, in fact, not create any new "great jazz artists" at all. With a little luck, it might produce a few semi-useful second row puppets, but that's about it. (And even those guys would likely never get hired, since the asshole mentality that has been drilled into them would make them completely impossible to work with...)