Not as far wrong as people seem to think

Rating: 10/10 (2 April 2018)

Minor spoilers
I know there are already plenty of reviews for this film, but a lot of the low scores are from people who say they don't believe the very premise of the story.
I have also studied music. In fact, I am also a drummer. Music school wasn't like this for me, but high school really was. I was never physically struck, but the threat of it was real enough, and the humiliation suffered in front of the other musicians was traumatic and the memory is painful enough more than 30 years later now that this was a hard movie to watch and yet I couldn't look away. This was so close to what I went through in high school that I would easily believe it if someone were to tell me that my high school band career was the source material.
J.K. Simmons, amazing in everything, was easily as good here and I could only wish that I could have had the strength of character and self confidence that Miles Teller's character demonstrates in this film. I loved the relationship he has with his father (pleasant surprise performance by Paul Reiser), but the general lack of support from a family that mostly doesn't understand his dream is also totally believable and is pretty common for musicians from a non-musical family. This was one of my favorite movies in a while. I just kept yelling at the screen, "I KNOW!! Right???" See this movie, and BELIEVE it.