Simmons roars into Oscar contention

If J.K. Simmons is known at all in this country - and you would be hard-pressed to find movie buffs who could pin a name to his familiar face - it is as the laid- back, wry father figures the hip, affable oldster kids don't mind having around.

Indeed, the most characteristic Simmons performance was the wonderfully understanding father in Juno who embraced every decision made by his preternaturally mature pregnant teenage daughter.

Most recently, Simmons has been getting attention for a similar role in the sitcom Growing Up Fisher in which he plays a blind lawyer who will not accept his disability and, in one hilarious scene, shows his learner-driver daughter how to reverse park.

However, even those of us who know Simmons from his vast body of work on film and TV - he is one of the great character actors, right up there with Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman - have been stunned by his performance in Whiplash, a blistering drama about a fearsome jazz maestro in a Juilliard-like elite New York music school who pushes an equally obsessive young drummer to new heights and ultimately over the edge.

Amusingly described as Full Metal Jacket meets Shine, Whiplash is a searching examination of the mental and physical sacrifices needed for a youngster to achieve greatness in his chosen field at the same time as questioning the methods of those pushing them to the next level.

Ever since being unveiled at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the main prize, Whiplash has been garnering rave reviews, with Simmons invariably talked about as a certainty for a best supporting Oscar (even though he's a support in the way that Geoffrey Rush was a support in The King's Speech). Quite simply, it is the year's best movie and one that will linger long in the memory after the jaw-dropping drum solo finale.

While Simmons admits that the monstrous Terence Fletcher in Whiplash is a radical change of pace, it is a return to the variety he enjoyed during the two decades he spent in the theatre and on Broadway and his celebrated early work on television.

"In my first prominent on-camera role I played the head of the Aryan brotherhood in a maximum-security prison, so I am back to where it all began," Simmons tells me over the phone, reminding me of the acclaimed television series Oz (it ran for six seasons on HBO from 1997-2003).

"In Spider-Man my character was a blowhard (he played the fast- talking Daily Bugle boss J. Jonah Jameson in the Sam Raimi blockbuster) but he was harmless and kind of lovable. So, yes, I have tended to play good guys," the 59-year-old Detroit-born actor explains.

Indeed, the directors Simmons has worked with clearly love him because they keep working with him again and again. He appeared in two Sam Raimi movies before Spider-Man (The Gift, For Love of the Game) and has had a role in many of the films directed by Jason Reitman, including Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air.

It was this bond with Reitman that led him to send Simmons the script for Whiplash, both the short and feature-length versions that young writer-director Damien Chazelle was struggling to finance. It was Reitman's idea that Chazelle first make a short version of Whiplash to whip up excitement among investors.

"I read it and it just blew my socks off. I said 'Sign me up'," Simmons recalls. "The initial encounter between Terence Fletcher and Andrew (the young jazz drummer played by Miles Teller in the feature-film version) was one of the best character- introduction scenes I had ever encountered.

"You get everything about these two characters just from their first moments together."

It is little wonder that Simmons connected to the character of the perfectionist, drill sergeant-like jazz teacher and conductor because he himself was a trained musician who, in his earlier years, had contemplated a career as a composer. Astonishingly, this fact was not known to Reitman or Chazelle.

"One of the first things that Damien said to me when we met was 'I don't want you to worry about the conducting and the musical aspect of the film. We'll have a technical adviser to help you to learn how to fake it and we'll use a body double'. And I said 'I got this'," Simmons laughs.

Indeed, he did have it, as one of the reasons Whiplash is so compelling is that Chazelle doesn't have to cut away from Simmons while he's conducting the band, with much of the final score the result of the sessions filmed with the actor out front and the musicians playing for real.

Even more amazing was that Teller was ready-made for the part. Clearly Chazelle wanted Teller because he is widely regarded as one the best actors of his generation and a superstar in waiting - what he didn't realise was the 27-year-old also was a trained rock drummer who had been pounding the skins since his teens.

"There is an element of kismet about this whole production. Having two actors doing what comes naturally to them certainly helps with the suspension of disbelief," Simmons says.

Another reason why Whiplash feels so authentic is that Harvard-trained writer-director Chazelle channelled into his second feature his own experience of studying drumming under an exacting high-school music teacher.

"I had a conductor who scared the hell out of me and had pushed his players really hard," Chazelle told Entertainment Weekly.

"Miles' character is the drummer who has dreams of being one of the greats but has no real sense if he actually has what it takes. He meets this conductor who pushes him harder than he's ever been pushed. And it's really a kind of mano-a-mano between two characters that explores this question of how much pushing is too much, how far is too far."

Indeed, Whiplash has sparked a passionate debate in the US, with articles and blogs on every aspect of the movie, from the vices and virtues of Fletcher's teaching methods to the representation of jazz (The New Yorker's Richard Brody argues that it is ludicrous the way the movie champions jazz legend Buddy Rich).

"One of the most gratifying aspects of Whiplash is the intensity of the debate it has stirred," Simmons says. "Some believe that my character is a monster; others see him as a champion of the tough-love school of pedagogy.

"Getting people talking is what Damien wanted to do. He is not interested in spoon-feeding the audience and telling them what to think and feel. He wants them to come to their own conclusions."

Whiplash opens tomorrow.